I learnt to “type” when I was at school, programming a Commodore Vic-20. I thought I was quite fast, but what I had really learnt was just the key combos for common words. It’s what most people who have never learnt properly before do, and it’s called “point and poke”. You don’t realise the extra effort you’re putting in, and the mistakes you’re making (overuse of the backspace key) and so on.

When I went to college at 16 (UK) to study computer science, we had the option of learning touch typing. We all thought we were pretty good at typing, but afterwards, we’d all doubled our typing speed (or more) and increased our accuracy by 10x. We learnt on proper electric golfball typewriters, and as we got better, we all noticed that code entry got a lot faster. The thing that is affected most, though, is typing up from notes or printed copy - because you don’t have to keep looking away from the source, back to the keyboard and screen, you can be much quicker. Also, typing your thoughts is much faster as you are not having to split your attention between the thoughts and the keyboard - what you think just appears on the screen without having to spend mental effort on typing.

It didn’t quite work like that. They used to arrive boxed in batches. The keyboards were worth about £100 back then - so would be worth a lot more in today’s money - and they were looked after with care whilst in transit. It was the end users (in offices) that put the gunk there.

Can confirm. Back at the beginning of my IT career (mid 1980’s), I worked as a temp for a computer manufacturer in their refurb repairs department. In those days, kit was so expensive that everything got repaired if it went wrong, and one of my jobs was repairing keyboards - PC keyboards, and dumb terminal ones - and the first part of the process was stripping and cleaning them. There was a lot more room for crumbs and dust back then, too, and man did they get full. Crumbs, staples, paper clips, hair grips, all sorts. I had literal mould growing in some of them. I remember the ones coming in from Italy were the worst for that for some reason.

Depends on accent:

South West: jrink me loike a bo’oh wa’er ('=glottal stop like in “ugh”)

London: drink me lyke a botto a wawtah

Merseyside: dlrinch me liche a bottull a wahtah (ch=choking sound)