I think my daughter is somewhere around 120 characters per minute now. What's crazy cool is she can be texting someone while talking to someone else.

In Crypto school in the Navy I got up to 42 wpm (5 characters per word for 210 characters per minute). I received the Samuel B. Morse award, and went on to get my ham license. I never did anything with it after the Navy, so my skills have waned, and I reckon I am somewhere around 14 wpm these days.

We used our code skills to id chinese, cuban, and russian contacts at sea, while at the same time fixing their location by df'ing their signals and coordinating with other operatives.

Definitely a lot of pucker factor back then. That was a different life.

There were some instructors who were real speed freaks on code, like somewhere around 65 wpm. It sounded like teletype at that speed, and I could only get the characters with the longer code strings, maybe one in five, at that speed. Those guys were amazing.