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Our second thing was, we wanted you to turn the package around and read the back copy.
#Mavis beacon teaches typing 2000 software
To walk into a software display and have our package catch your eye, number one. When we pressed him to see if he ever had the same kind of possible backstory for Mavis Beacon that we did, Abrams claimed there really never was one.
"Teachers call in and want to know more about Mavis and where she's teaching these days," Adrienne Hankin, who ran PR for the Mavis Beacon brand told The New York Times back in 1998. "I thought I read somewhere that she had won a big typing contest, or that she ran a school, or something," a guy named Brent Bynum told The Seattle Times in 1995. "One day I was walking through ComDex, which was a big computer show back in the 80s, and one of my frenemies-who worked for a competing company-said, 'How did you land Mavis Beacon to endorse your product and use your teaching method? We've been after her for years, and we never could find her and get her to endorse our product!'" Abrams told us the folks at The Software Toolworks didn't respond by falsely claiming to have scored the endorsement of a legendary typist, "nor did we come out and do anything to say, this is not a real person." According to Abrams, there at the perfume counter, while shopping for a gift, Crane and Abrams met their typing teacher. One day at their office in Beverly Hills, during the creation of their typing program, Crane asked Abrams to join him on a trip to Saks Fifth Avenue. According to Abrams, Crane was instrumental to the creation of Mavis Beacon. Crane, who had an excess of personality, had been a talk show host in the 1960s, and a creator of weird, spoken-word music in the 1970s.
The Software Toolworks had recently combined with a software company owned by a minor celebrity named Les Crane. According to Abrams, it's a story of serendipity.
#Mavis beacon teaches typing 2000 Pc
In 1985, two years before Mavis Beacon debuted, an Evelyn Wood PC application had been released called The Evelyn Wood Dynamic Reader.īut there was more to the creation of Beacon than the company's policy of anthropomorphism in service of sales. Hare's chin-scratching old man character forever symbolized, as Abrams put it, "a person, a wizard, a chessmaster!" rather than a "black box," a term Abrams uses for the computerized rules and the opponent's artificial intelligence.Įvelyn Wood was a teacher in the mid-twentieth century who invented the term "speed reading," and made a name for herself by co-creating a program called Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics. He and his team hired character actor Will Hare to dress up as a wizard, and pose for the now iconic cover. "We felt like if you could believe that you were playing another person, as opposed to a machine, that would make it much more engaging," Abrams said. This started with 1985's The Chessmaster 2000, which stood out from a large crop of early chess games and became a legendary franchise.
#Mavis beacon teaches typing 2000 how to
While there were actual great PC games out about killing Nazis, killing space demons, and killing it at puzzle-solving, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing! wasn't so much a game as, well, a system for teaching you how to type without looking at the keyboard.Ībrams told us the creation of a whole fictional character was part of the company's overall strategy at the time: Anthropomorphize the programs. Either way, it was always around.Īnd someone probably made you spend some time practicing on it. If you grew up in the 90s, maybe you remember Mavis as the least appealing "game" in the bundle of CD-Roms your dad picked up at Costco. If you grew up in the 80s, some tech-savvy person you knew forked over a whole $39.99 to get their hands on Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing!, a sensational new educational tool. Abrams was one of the founders of The Software Toolworks, the company that designed Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing!. She's our symbol of excellence," Joe Abrams, one of Mavis Beacon's creators told VICE in an interview.
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