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80's, 90's Kids Were Lied To All Along

Jeremy

Jeremy

CF Founder
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Feb 28, 2006
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Waukee, IA
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Jeremy said:
Mavis Beacon DIDN'T teach you to type. How this isn't the biggest news of the day, I don't know. I feel like my whole youth was a lie.

www.engadget.com

Seeking Mavis Beacon is a wild Sundance doc about the search for a lost tech icon | Engadget

With a healthy dose of heart and whimsy, the Sundance documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon follows two young Black women who are devoted to finding the original model for Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing..
www.engadget.com www.engadget.com
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I learned to type in the 80s and have never heard of her.
 
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Jeremy said:
Mavis Beacon DIDN'T teach you to type. How this isn't the biggest news of the day, I don't know. I feel like my whole youth was a lie.

www.engadget.com

Seeking Mavis Beacon is a wild Sundance doc about the search for a lost tech icon | Engadget

With a healthy dose of heart and whimsy, the Sundance documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon follows two young Black women who are devoted to finding the original model for Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing..
www.engadget.com www.engadget.com
Click to expand...

We didn't have typing class.

We had "keyboarding", mother *******
 
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I had a teacher tell us not to take typing because if an employer knows you can type, they'll make you do it. Kind of put me at disadvantage working 40 years in IT!
 
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Our schools used Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, though it was pretty easy to master and move beyond. However, it was probably the first widespread application used throughout an industry.

Ahh, the days of Encarta, Netscape, AIM, ICQ, Winamp, RealPlayer, mICQ, Oregon Trail, Incredible Machines. Those were simpler times.
 
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Jeremy said:
Our schools used Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, though it was pretty easy to master and move beyond. However, it was probably the first widespread application used throughout an industry.

Ahh, the days of Encarta, Netscape, AIM, ICQ, Winamp, RealPlayer, mICQ, Oregon Trail, Incredible Machines. Those were simpler times.
Click to expand...

Take me back! I remember getting to school and booting up Netscape to read the pro wrestling dirt sheets before they ruined it.

It was always like, “Chris Benoit is feuding with Eddy Guerrero in the ring, but outside of the ring? We hear Benoit and his fellow
Canadian Bret Hart almost came to blows back stage with Jim Neidhart having to retrieve Jimmy Hart to separate the two. Could this be real animosity or is creative already starting to cook for Wrestlemania?”
 
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Jeremy said:
Mavis Beacon DIDN'T teach you to type. How this isn't the biggest news of the day, I don't know. I feel like my whole youth was a lie.

www.engadget.com

Seeking Mavis Beacon is a wild Sundance doc about the search for a lost tech icon | Engadget

With a healthy dose of heart and whimsy, the Sundance documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon follows two young Black women who are devoted to finding the original model for Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing..
www.engadget.com www.engadget.com
Click to expand...

I think we had one year of typing before our school bought Mavis Beacon. You just got a sheet of words to type while the teacher walking around and berated you if he caught you looking at your hands.

Compared to that Mavis Beacon felt like they let us play video games to learn to type.
 
Gunnerclone said:
Take me back! I remember getting to school and booting up Netscape to read the pro wrestling dirt sheets before they ruined it.

It was always like, “Chris Benoit is feuding with Eddy Guerrero in the ring, but outside of the ring? We hear Benoit and his fellow
Canadian Bret Hart almost came to blows back stage with Jim Neidhart having to retrieve Jimmy Hart to separate the two. Could this be real animosity or is creative already starting to cook for Wrestlemania?”
Click to expand...
While many parts of a kid's life are far more difficult today (driven partly by social media), kids have it really easy when it comes to media consumption and computer usage.

I remember the incredible joy of building computers when I was 8, finding things on Usenet, constantly updating Netscape/Communicator, using FrontPage, etc. Now kids don't have to worry about when a tv show is going to be on, who's online to get their message, where to find good "warez", setting up a download manager to queue your 20 rar file download over 2-3 days, using WinRar to unpack music downloaded illegally, maintaining your Geocities site, keeping up with your SimCity builds, etc.
 
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Jeremy said:
While many parts of a kid's life are far more difficult today (driven partly by social media), kids have it really easy when it comes to media consumption and computer usage.

I remember the incredible joy of building computers when I was 8, finding things on Usenet, constantly updating Netscape/Communicator, using FrontPage, etc. Now kids don't have to worry about when a tv show is going to be on, who's online to get their message, where to find good "warez", setting up a download manager to queue your 20 rar file download over 2-3 days, using WinRar to unpack music downloaded illegally, maintaining your Geocities site, etc.
Click to expand...

I might try to log in to my NeoPets account today lol.
 
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The real ones know...

M%C3%85LGRUPPE.gif
 
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Vaguely remember the Mavis Beacon character/software but never used it. But in 8th grade "Computer Science" in 1985, we did "keyboarding" to learn to type. Typing was a business class - originally it was for girls wanting to get jobs, but by the 80s it was for anyone that was going into "business".

Back to keyboarding - our Computer teacher would say a key three times, and then "space". So you hit the key 3 times and then space bar. The important part was you had to use the correct finger based on the home row rules.

But the teacher had kind of a stutter/impairment, where he said "ahh" about 500 times per hour. So you would get "ahh a a a space...b ahhh b b space... c c c ahhh space". It was like watching a sitcom where you think this would never happen in real life. Except it was real life.

FWIW, that guy quit teaching, invented some kind of software and apparently made a boatload of money. Wish dad had done same! update - googled him and he is a teaching asst at in the Mech E dept now. Holy crap.
 
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