What's Mavis Beacon Up to These Days? (2015)

Love it! That's how I learned too.

We had an all in one keyboard gadget called a type-right. Tiny LCD screen. Actually very good. Much better than Mavis beacon.

> Question for the Americans - is Mavis Beacon a reasonable name for someone to be called where you come from?

I would say so. Mavis is a bit old fashioned, but it was a very common name at one time[1]. Beacon is not a common last name, but IMDB does list a few people with that as their last name[2] (and a lot more with "Deacon" as their last name; I could totally buy the B and D getting switched out at some point in the family's history, especially if they immigrated in the 19th century when record-keeping was much less stringent).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavis

[2] https://www.imdb.com/find?q=beacon&s=nm&ref_=fn_al_nm_mr

American here. It is a totally weird name.

The old real Mavis I have ever heard of is Mavis Leno, the wife of comedian Jay Leno. He used to mention her on his show sometimes.

It's weird but no more weird than carmen sandiego, homer simpson, betty crocker or arnold schwarzenegger

Well, as the article explains, "Mavis Beacon" was not the name of the company. It was indeed intended to be a person's name. To me, it has the feeling of a name that _could_ be real but which is also a little bit on the nose -- kind of a Holly Golightly situation.

The US being a “melting pot” probably means that unusual names are more common than the UK which is homogeneous by comparison.

Also, and I don’t know if other countries do this, but Americans just love coming up with unusual and distinct names for their kids. “Oprah”, for example. “Lincoln” for both a boy and a girl seems to be in vogue at the moment.

It’s a little less obvious however than Carmen Sandiego.

For me the name Mavis will always bring to mind a rather colorful character from the incomparable Illuminatus! Trilogy.

It's not common, but it's not unprecedented, either. I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Mavis Staples, a legendary blues singer who's won multiple Grammy Awards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavis_Staples

It's a perfectly normal name for someone around the age of 80, I know several.

I had a pre-school teacher (in the 80s, in the south of England) named Mavis, and knew of several other older people with that name. It doesn't seem like an unreasonable name even in the UK.

Colonel Sanders was a real man who made chicken, though. He’s just as much a fiction as Dave Thomas who founded Wendy’s.

Wired perhaps, but they were not benevolent enough, at least for Jemma, Ben, and Sam:

"Aunt Jemima brand to change name, remove image that Quaker says is 'based on a racial stereotype'" - [0]

"Uncle Ben's Changing Name To Ben's Original After Criticism Of Racial Stereotyping" "Mars also said it will remove the image of the elderly Black man in a bow tie from its packaging." [1]

"73,000 signature petition calls for takedown of landmark Uncle Sam billboard" "The billboard sits off Exit 72 on private property and has been in Lewis County since the late 1960s." [2]

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/aunt-jemima-brand-will-...

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racia...

[2] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/73000-signature-petition-ca...

Don't forget Slash.

I'm somewhere inbetween, which honestly just means that I'm a bad touch typist.

I don't hunt-and-peck, but I'm also not perfectly keeping at rest on the home row. The result is mostly touch-typing, but if I don't have the keyboard in my peripheral vision, I start to drift.

Really just means I can't sit in complete darkness, but I'm sure it would have some implications if I were to try and use VR with anything that requires actual typing.

I never had an aptitude for touch typing, but became very good at hunt and peck typing. This year I finally started to use proper form and not look at my fingers to type. I’m still slower than I was hunting and pecking, but I can pretty much write anything now without looking at my hands. Only took 35 years.

I’m self taught and have a strange style. I am hunt and peck touch typist, at about 70wpm, and use my left thumb for space and left pinky for shift. Otherwise I just use both my index fingers very quickly, but there is an upper limit on how fast two index fingers can move.

An unexpected benefit is my hands and wrists are positioned in such a way that I don’t get much strain / carpal tunnel. My hands get more stressed from using the touchpad than typing.

I'd probably be classed as a hunt and peck typist, but I've never had issues with typing speed or accuracy. So I don't think it has affected my productivity at all.

Of course I don't know what would have happened if I'd started with touch typing. Although in fact I tried to learn touch typing with Mavis Beacon not long after it appeared, but it cramped my fingers almost instantly, so I stopped.

As for typing in general - depending how old your kids are, I'd consider the possibility that by the time they reach college age typing will be as much use to them as handwriting is to current students. I.e. some value, but not as important as other skills.

I'd be very surprised if we don't have conversational interfaces with human-level comprehension within twenty years - possibly ten at a push.

You might think code will always be typed, but I honestly wouldn't be sure about that.

I've seen many hunt and peckers (mostly older adults 55+ who never had a reason to type daily [computers, typewriters, etc.] and younger people <18 [cellphones]). For older adults it makes sense they use the hunt and peck method because they have little reason to learn touch typing (they got this far without it and if they only need to interact for a few minutes with a keyboard here and there that's okay). However, for younger people their world is different. They do most of their typing on tablets/phones where two finger pressing via the hunt and peck method is easier/reliable (try and type up something on a tablet screen using the touch typing method and see how often you'll make a mistake). So, your opinion of learning touch typing applies mainly to solid keyboards used for extended periods of time while hunt/peck skills serve them better with touch screens. My wife is a hunt/peck user and while her speed isn't the best she seems to have decent speed when she has hunt/peck-ed the same key multiple times (aka warmed up). So, with all that said, hunt/peckers in my opinion only type best when they are warmed up and usually tend to only have limited amount of things to type into the machine.

130WPM, thanks to TypeRacer. Went from 70-130 and made the leaderboards a few times.

It’s not particularly useful outside of IM where you can get your thoughts out before getting interrupted.

My mom made me take a typing class just before high school -- in the late 70s. She said: "I'm not going to type your term papers for you." Then I took a class in BASIC and fell in love with programming. By the time I got to college, I was a very fast typist.

I noticed that between my two kids, both graduated from high school now, the one who never learned to type had a hard time throughout school because of it. If there's a physical obstacle to typing, it will translate into a difficulty learning to write. They did vastly more writing in school than I ever did.

In college, I preferentially chose courses where the grades were based on written work rather than exams, and I got to the point where I could sling text like nobody's business. I was also the first student at the college to submit a word processed paper.

I don't know if typing should necessarily affect coding. After all, you really shouldn't be coding faster than you can think anyway. What matters is how much good code you can write, and that might include time spent away from the keyboard altogether.

In elementary school we used some software that thought teaching, but IIRC it was for some special program and it also was mostly for fun (we had access to LogoWriter and some other software). We quickly figured out you could type nonsense, delete it, then type out the required text and the software would measure ~350 wpm. Learned nothing else. : )

I took typing as an elective one semester in high school because I couldn’t stand hunt and pecking when I was trying to get things done. We’d get done early and just type out lyrics to House of the Rising Sun. We’d also replace homonyms or type nonsense lyrics. A few years later internet chat rooms were big and I’d be in half a dozen of them plus various private chats. My wpm ended up being such that people who saw me in real life would notice the speed. Easily over 100 wpm (not 350 though!).

These days I very quickly adapt to macros, function keys, and remappings. I type nearly as fast as I can think of the words. I thumb-type on the phone noticeably fast (lead singer of a bar band called me out on my speed one NYE). And I memorize my passwords physically. I lay that all at learning to touch type in the first place.

We had mandatory typing classes when I was in the equivalent of middle school. Not every day, something like 3x/week for a few months. It was all 100% manual typewriters that were built for practice, and had pull-out plastic sheets built in that would hide your hands from view for test time.

I actually genuinely enjoyed it. The force of the long-throw of the manual keys was fun to feel, and the different heights of the rows made it pretty easy to learn where your fingers should be. It did always annoy me a little to use the lower-case l as the number one, though.

When I was a kid, we had Mavis Beacon both at home and at school, along with other interactive programs and games for learning to type. In school we also had those silicon mask things to hide which keys were which in order to learn "home row" and all that.

These days though, I've memorized the positions of all of the keys, so while I _mostly_ use my index fingers to type, I also will switch to thumbs or other fingers on occasion depending on the keyboard. I rarely if ever look at the keyboard.

So it's almost like I use a combination of touch typing with pecking. Works well enough for me and my WPM isn't bad, either.

I was taught touch typing in 1st grade, then straight on to logo and basic. This was in 1986, so the school I was at was a bit ahead of its time.

I had typing classes on a mechanical typewriter in junior high school; after that I maxed out on Mavis Beacon (i.e., got to the point where all she could think to do was give me more speed or punctuation drills).

I don't think typing quickly helps you code more quickly per se. But it certainly helps me write out comments more quickly; and at some point, a big chunk of your time is spent arguing^W discussing with people about how to code properly; at that point, being able to type more quickly is a big advantage.

One of the tips in "Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought" is to learn touch typing, which is what prompted me to take the plunge. I got a 2nd hand CD of KAZ and within about two weeks I'd got the "I know kung fu" feeling. Productivity definitely improved.

Now if I could only find something similar for learning piano.