APAD: Hunt and peck

Meaning:

    Typing by looking for characters on the keyboard individually.

 

Background:

   As a two-finger typist, I've always admired the speed and dexterity of those

   who touch-type. I stick with `hunt and peck - that is, I find for a character

   on the keyboard and then stab at it with the nearest index finger.

 

   The expression `hunt and peck' of course began with the typewriter and we

   need not look for its origin beyond the date of that machine's invention.  As

   it turns out, that gives us quite some scope as the earliest machines that

   can lay claim to being called typewriters date from the early 18th century.

   In the UK in 1714, Henry Mill was granted Patent No. 395, which was described

   by the patent committee like this:

 

     Our Trusty and welbeloved Henry Mill, gent., hath by his petition humbly

     represented vnto us, That he hath by his great study and paines & expence

     invented and brought to perfection an artificial machine or method for

     impressing or transcribing of letters, one after another, as in writing,

     whereby all writing whatsoever may be engrossed in paper or parchment so

     neat and exact as not to be distinguished from print.

 

   We have no picture of the device, but that sounds like a typewriter to me.

 

   Early typewriters were heavy and not suited to fast typing - there was little

   alternative to `hunt and peck' as a typing method. Nevertheless, the

   expression didn't come into public use for some long time after typewriters

   were in general circulation.

 

- www.phrases.org.uk [edited]

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In high school our job was to cram for Gaokao but the first summer, as one of

the "good" students, I had the enviable opportunity to learn to program, on an

Apple 2. I didn't know there was such a thing as touch-typing and for two weeks,

our teacher, a tall, handsome, artistic-looking man, mesmerized us with panache

at the keyboard. "Hunt and peck," however, was all I could do to try to ape. As

a result, coding was 80 percent about finding and pressing the right keys and

erasing and re-entering characters and then fixing more typos after the machine

failed to execute. It was as much fun as rewiring my brain to become a machine

myself. The computer finally ran my program but I would gladly stay away from

the touchy little critter the rest of my life.