I took typing my sophomore year in high school. It was called just that --- typing--- and the class room was filled with only females. After all we were the ones who were going to become secretaries, and the males absent from that room were the ones who were going to direct our flying fingers. There was no way any of those males would ever need to know how to use a typewriter, but in 1957 our female future might rest on how many words a minute we could type.
Jump a generation or so and the entrance of keyboarding. There is absolutely no difference in the letter placement on my old Olivetti and my current ASUS, the difference is only in how that letter placement is described. For now one finds both sexes in the class room learning how to type. Opps, did I say type? Of course, I meant keyboard.
I can remember when the sea change of typing versus keyboarding hit our family. My husband had just switched from a job where he had a fulltime secretary to a teaching position where they showed him his office and his very own computer. Nary a convenient typist in sight. He swallowed hard, and dug into this new world, although I will admit there were a few calls to me at my office for help with the commands on his new-to-him computer. There was no hope that he would ever learn real keyboarding, but his two fingers now fly over the keyboard, and he is completely comfortable, or at least as comfortable as anyone in our age group can be, with the computer and the keyboarding that comes with it.
One last comment on that collection of letters on the keyboard in front of us. My grandchildren, who barely know what a typewriter is, may be keyboarding, but unknown to them, they are still bound by the dictates of that old fashioned instrument --- the typewriter. The keys are arranged so that a fast typist of the old school would not hit frequently used keys, such as the 'e', in a way that would cause it to stick to another letter as it struck the paper wound into the machine.
The moral of this story for those in the under seventy crowd is: that ancient, forgotten past may still be quietly lurking there affecting you today.