For me, typing is thinking. I have a minor neurological disorder that affects my ability to handwrite. I can never write beautifully, but if I concentrate hard I can PRINT legibly. My cursive was never legible. The problem even with printing for me is that it takes so much effort for me to print that I can't really compose. I was falling behind in school, until mu parents got the bright idea of buying me a typewriter when I was seven and persauded the school to let me into a touch typing class intended for older people. From then on I did well in school. Composing on a keyboard is composing and thinking for m e. Before computers, composition mean't typing a first draft, xxxing out and modifying as I went along. Revising meant literally cutting and pasting with scissors and tape (not paste -with my coordination problem too much of the paste would end up in incovenient places). Typing most of even short revisions and taping them onto the original, or crossing out words by hand and maybe hand printing if I only needed to insert a word or two. Then once all revisions were done, retyping the final draft. You can imagine that word processing made my life much much easier when it came about.
At any rate, if I'd lived before keyboards I simply could not have been a writer or done research that involved notetaking. Before keyboards, a poor hand was considered a sign of ill educated, the barely literate. And the same thing that prevents me from handwriting would have prevented me from me good at most manual labor. Even manual labor that is dismissed as "unskilled" actually takes a great deal of coordination. "Unskilled" labor mostly is highly skilled labor that is dismissed as unskilled simply because it is done by workers with little leverage. But when crackdowns on imigrants drove out farm workers or slaughterhouse employees, one of the reasons owners could not easily find American replacements was not only the low wages and horrible working conditions, but the fact that the skills required for these jobs are not easy to learn. It takes about five years to learn to be a skilled farm worker, the same amount of time it takes most people to get their "four-year" degree these days.
So I guess before keyboards I would have failed elementary school, and never received even a basic education. . Since I would not have been able to learn most crafts as well, I would have been dismissed as a slow great ox, incapable of learning anything. Or more likely as too lazy to learn. I don't know what my fate would have been, but it would not have a pleasant one. So I don't have much sympathy for those who mourn the prevalence of keyboards and computers. For me, a world without keyboards would be a nightmare. Without computers, well as long as I had a typewriter it would be tolerable, but computers save me a great deal of misery.
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