I'm under 30, but I had the benefit of being taught to type starting when I was 6. Somebody (probably dad) realized my visual impairment was going to lead me to using computers for everything and therefore I should spend a lot of time at school learning to type. It amazes half my friends how fast I can touch type and I'm not really very fast (between 60 and 80 wpm in most cases). My speed was terrible until I took the optional typing course in high school. Perhaps half the course was typing and the rest was about using things like Paint and Word.

At no point in school did they ever really force anyone to learn touch typing. There was a half-hearted effort in grade 4 and that was about it. It amounted to "do this exercise today and you can play Oregon Trail." I was completely appalled at this by the time I was in high school. They were having us do all sorts of assignments with computers, but there was no effort anywhere in education to even try and have a basic standard for computer knowledge.

I learned to type using the same sort of materials my mom used in the 70s. For her it means she can type really fast and uses all kinds of manual tabbing tricks to format documents in MS Word. For me it means I can type faster when looking at something else to copy than I can when looking at the screen.

The weird thing was even though they nagged us about handle times they didn't do much about them. They let me get away with spending half a day fixing some people's machines. If I was the one selling a support contract on a call like that it made my close rate and resolution rate look awesome. They even let me fix stuff we weren't supposed to touch because hardware support had tried and ruined the person's week.

Of course they decided working like this was too expensive and moved our jobs to a centre in the Philippines. Spent the last three months of my job fixing credit card fraud committed by those guys, who were magically still loved by the American customers. It seems they were told to sell something at all costs.

This was often the case when I worked at Dell. If the hardware guys in India were past their quota of dollars in parts to send for the day they would hang up on customers. I worked in paid software support, so that wasn't usually something I saw unless I called on behalf of a customer to get something fixed. The last time that happened to me it resulted in me learning how to exchange a laptop myself by request of my superiors.

That said, a huge number of them really were useless. I got told to confim a part number with hardware support before transferring the lady who wanted it to spare parts. The guy on the other end took my description and part number and then came back with the number for a power cable! The Indians on my team hated these guys too, so it seemed to be partially a corporate culture problem (despite that being a Dell-owned facility) in addition to a regular accent/culture problem.

Please elaborate for us non-Americans.

GameTree says their website.

Perhaps you would like DarkXL. It will do for Dark Forces what the various ports did for DooM.

I worked for them for a while. When we looked up the service tag for a gx270 a screen would appear saying something like, "if this machine shows [list of symptoms] DO NOT TROUBLESHOOT. Send a new mainboard immediately!" It was a fairly long screen IIRC, but I can't remember the rest of it. I didn't see it often because I mostly worked on consumer machines. The funny part was all our workstations were gx260/270.

I thought that referred to Jesus being born without sin rather than to Mary being a virgin.

Yeah, I meant to imply the company that made the classic games. It being sold, split, resold, etc. were the basis for the second part of my comment, even though I didn't remember the ultimate fate of the brand. I should have made that clear, but I got lazy. :)

Atari is American. Or at least it was. What exactly it is now I don't know, but it isn't the company that made the stuff we loved in the 70s and 80s.