Mavis Beacon was the top typing teacher in the US, then she vanished
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
her: "Really??? You thought she was a real person? JOHN. Come on."
me: "I thought she was a real person, like Orville Redenbacher. I didn't know she was made up like Betty Crocker."
her: "WAIT, BETTY CROCKER WASN'T REAL??"
oh, the laughs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Female_characters_in_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Male_characters_in_ad...
Unfortunately they mix the obviously fictional in with the less obviously fictional (like cartoon characters with more plausible characters).
> After leaving his position as head chef at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, Boiardi opened a restaurant called Il Giardino d'Italia in 1924 at East 9th Street and Woodland Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. The idea for Chef Boyardee came about when restaurant customers began asking Boiardi for his spaghetti sauce, which he began to distribute in milk bottles. Four years later, in 1928, Boiardi opened a factory and moved production to Milton, Pennsylvania, where he could grow his own tomatoes and mushrooms. He decided to name his product "Boy-Ar-Dee" to help Americans pronounce his name correctly. The first product to be sold was a "ready-to-heat spaghetti kit" in 1928. The kit included uncooked pasta, tomato sauce, and a container of pre-grated cheese.
It never crossed my mind that she was not an entrepreneur until I read this comment.
When I arrived at the meet & greet, the journalists thought I was a model (!) hired to be a figurehead. I had to show them my passport to convince them that was my real name, and answer a bunch of tech questions to show I knew all about C++ and compilers.
It was a very amusing experience for me, especially that some people thought I was handsome enough to be a model, LOL.
P.S. I still have the green shirt!
This is a great story. I'm wondering if any of them had techie friends that set them up.
"I'm going to interview Walter Bright!"
"Oh yeah? You know that's not a real person, right?"
I think I would do that if I ever got the chance. "You think the guy who created Linux is named Linus? Really? Well, okay I guess"
Plus, "Zortech" ... wth kind of name is that? Someone couldn't make this stuff up as fiction! And a journalist that knew the right question to see if you knew about C plus plus ... You almost had me til there.
Although, of course, being the sexiest software engineer is a little bit like being the tallest person in the Lollipop Guild...
And yet, as soon as he started wearing the clothes people thought he was a brand ambassador and model. Because it was really just another "impression" for a brand people otherwise ignored.
Funny outcome. The clothes are a decent style.
Ettore Boiardi, aka Chef Boyardee, was a real person as well:
Mavis Beacon taught me to type. I don't really care if she's real or not, I'll always have a soft spot for that CD!
I don't understand comments like this. Why go through the effort of articulating your lack of interest in a topic? "I have no intellectual curiosity about this topic, but I figure I should still comment letting the world know I have no interest in this".
They are not saying, "I have no interest in this."
Interestingly, I suspect you understand it fully.
No one I knew could type, so I had to learn myself. By the time it was taught in HS, my habits and muscle memory weren't having it. I could type 'properly' but far slower, so I gave up.
To this day I've never had a RSI from typing (and some of the marathons were crazy!), and it's rampant among 'proper' typers.
One of the best things I ever did for myself. If you’re reading this and you don’t touch-type, learn. Now.
(They kicked me out eventually, so nothing good came of the copying.)
I remember briefly learning to type from a Mavis Beacon book but practicing on those clicker mechanical keyboards drove my parents nuts!
For a left-field alternative for super young kids (3? 4?) just being introduced to letters/keyboard try out Typatone (https://typatone.com/). Get a wireless keyboard and throw it up on a big screen. Something interesting happens when there's the added layer of reactive sound tied to what they've typed. It's a really good way of recognizing letters, and learning where to find them on a keyboard. And then common words take on a specific "song". There's probably something to this in an education space for someone to build on.
https://www.npr.org/2018/11/02/663372770/mario-segale-inspir...
It is my dim recollection from reading Game Over by David Sheff many years ago that the incident when "Segale was said to have made an impression on his tenants when he allegedly stormed into Nintendo's offices in Tukwila, Wash., demanding they catch up on late rent" (as the NPR article writes) happened when they already had the Donkey Kong cabinets in their final form.
The article from Benj Edwards cited at the end of the NPR article says
> Legend has it that NOA President Minoru Arakawa noticed physical similarities between Donkey Kong’s short, dark-haired protagonist and the landlord. So the crew at NOA nicknamed the character Mario, and it stuck.
And that seams eminently plausible to me; that someone said to Shigeru Miyamoto (Mario's creator) "hey, they guys at the American office have started calling the character 'Mario' because he looks like our landlord who is named Mario" and Miyamoto ran with it.
Mario wasn't really a full personality back then. He's a generic dude with a mustache
Well I've always had a deep respect
And I mean that most sincere
The band is just fantastic
That is really what I think
Oh by the way, which one's Pink?And vice versa.
You could literally write a PhD thesis on this Mavis Beacon thing by running it through the lense of Debord's "Society of the Spectacle."
As an aside, The "Contain" podcast is great. Lots of interviews with lots of unusual intellectual people.
What is the intention of this comment? That Debord is “far right” or a reactionary? That people who read him are? That it’s interesting that a Marxist philosopher is read by reactionaries?
This happens a lot if you read books that aren't bestsellers. A thing that for decades you couldn't find a person who had heard of it suddenly is in television commercials and image macros because a character mentioned it in a movie, or some twitch streamer decided to rail about it for an hour, and it caught fire.
1. Flirting with the girl I later married over ICQ
2. Getting rushed and begging for help in StarCraft 1
Both things require timely and efficient typed communication!
Sink or swim scenarios work best for me.
I miss the old internet.
Bottom line: Mavis Beacon helped me code faster, but Microsoft helped me write blogs faster.
If I am writing blogs or if I'm writing scripts, I find that I can dictate much faster and then just edit the sentences afterwards in order to clarify. The process of dictation plus editing is faster for me than if I were to type out everything.
As such I'm EXTREMELY GLAD that I had the choice to learn how to type on my own and made a conscious choice to learn Dvorak instead of QWERTY.
I feel that kids these days are forced into QWERTY as part of curriculum and I think that's a terrible forced propagation of a shitty standard.
There's adecnotal evidence of both in favor of Dvorak which is more than good enough for me.
Anyway, it was super easy to learn, I was lightyears ahead of my classmates in touch typing, so I'm happy.
It does open some unique niches, but it’s also easy to oversell that advantages while ignoring the disadvantages.
Dvorak is even less useful than being a leftie (since lefties still have the same hands in the same orientation), it’s more like if someone switched/mirrored the hands themselves.
Which, if everyone had the same setup would be fine. But since not everyone does, better get used to constantly switching and adjusting things.
I don't.
> if it is a common skill or requirement
It almost never is, in my personal experience.
Dvorak is available as an option on all the major OSes on a per-user basis. It's literally zero issue.
I travel frequently (well did not that long ago), and regularly work on a equipment that others use daily.
I’d get nothing but hassles if I had to change keyboard layouts, especially since there is so much variation in keyboards I interact with sometimes that touch typing gets high error rates at first.
And if I didn’t switch someone’s layout back before leaving, the anger would be non-trivial.
Most folks I know at some point also need to use a computer at work, or did at school (but aren’t techies), so not knowing QWERTY isn’t going to go well for them. As would trying to switch keyboard layouts every time they go somewhere or do something. Most folks have zero time for that kind of thing.
I have a video on YouTube where I type using the Dvorak layout. One of the comments said "wow, it looks like your hand is doing nothing, but you're typing 90 wpm".
QWERTY is ubiquitous enough that I think all English-speaking computer users must know it; so I wouldn't recommend Dvorak instead-of QWERTY. (I'm typing on QWERTY now).
I think this isn't necessarily a good thing when it comes to RSI. Spreading out the load onto other muscles and having some minor downtime seems to help me the most.
Eg on my mouse hand turning down sensitivity made things better, because it required me to make bigger sweeping motions with my arm rather than small motions with my hand.
This is because there is absolutely no ability to set up a "good" experiment which results ought to be consider as "good". And as a Dvorak touchtypist I can assure you that if you are at least 30 years old or you have already your touchtyping skill on qwerty than you will not gain anything from re-learning.
But for me when I realized that I need touchtyping (for programming without struggling with keyboard's keys which are even not from my mother language's alphabet) and I have found Dvorak's work, I just refused to use qwerty immediately and 10 years ago I consider this as one of three best decisions in my life. Other two was to learn English and to invest in Bitcoin.
Mavis Beacon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28767251 - Oct 2021 (4 comments)
What's Mavis Beacon Up to These Days? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25530183 - Dec 2020 (58 comments)
Subject: Inaccuracy in article on Mavis Beacon
The article at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/mavis-beac... states that The Software Toolworks was "founded in 1990." I believe this to be a mistake; it does not make sense in the context of the article discussing things that they did in 1986 and 1987. Wikipedia tells me that The Software Toolworks was founded in 1980.
Does anyone remember this?
I'm no longer of 'in-education' age so my opinion may be way off , but Broderbund seemed to fill an educational niche that is no longer as explored as it was.
The people who are investigating over this are trying to turn a non-issue into an industry problem.
With them, everything is always a problem with no solutions and all it is about is just complaining. Especially about a character that doesn't even exist. Somehow it is a problem.
But don't worry. Maybe one day, the Mavis Beacon actor might consider releasing an NFT collection for all her fans.
Someday.
I thought Mavis Beacon was real back in the day, because why wouldn't she be? It was just a nice looking lady, not like a cartoon character who teaches you typing or anything like that. I assumed maybe she was just a world class typer when I was 10 or so.
If it is obvious that Mavis Beacon isn't real to some, I would love to know how they understand that Mavis is fake, but, say, the guy on the "Norton Utilities", "Norton Antivirus" is a real person.
Secondly, mavis beacon is something that featured very prominently in my age group, and thus I’ve reminisced about it with friends and colleagues, no one referred to it as anything more than a program.
I have no idea where Norton figures into this. But you mentioning it makes me think you’re just trolling.
That game show on PBS was my favorite and I was genuinely sad when Lynne Thigpen died. That show got me into Jeopardy!, and then into the trivia group I found on a local discussion forum, and then through a friendship made there into the job I've had for many years.
Hit it, Rockapella.
I miss the educational games of the 90s.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Sandiego_(video_game_se... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Mountain! [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_of_Dr._Brain
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/carmen-sandiego-found_n_578e6...
ppl are still looking