Question for the Americans - is Mavis Beacon a reasonable name for someone to be called where you come from?
I grew up in the UK and for me it was always obviously just a company who had an eponymous avatar that lead the teaching. I would put that down to the fact that I would never expect Mavis Beacon to be the name of a person but a perfectly reasonable name for a company.
> 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).
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 real singer from whom they borrowed the “Mavis” is named Mavis Staples. Which, to my ear, if I didn’t know she was a real person sounds just uncanny enough to have been made up by a company as marketing.
That's what I was trying for, but I didn't check if any of the fictional ones were based on real people. It was a light hearted way to illustrate that there are so many names that it's common to hear some that sound weird to you.
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.
> Winfrey was born Orpah Gail Winfrey; her first name was spelled Orpah (not Oprah) on her birth certificate after the biblical figure in the Book of Ruth, but people mispronounced it regularly and "Oprah" stuck.
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.
> Abrams said Crane came up with the first name, "Mavis," in honor of singer Mavis Staples. "Beacon," had something to do with a "beacon of light," Abrams said.
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.
It's just an old name that's a couple-three generations out of fashion. It was a common-enough name for older female characters in 1960s sitcoms, so for a lot of HN types it would likely be a great-grandmother-era name.
> "She's our Betty Crocker. She's our symbol of excellence," Joe Abrams, one of Mavis Beacon's creators told VICE in an interview. Abrams was one of the founders of The Software Toolworks, the company that designed Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing!.
About fictional people as spokespersons, we might as well add:
- Modern Santa Claus (Coca-Cola)
- Aunt Jemima
- Uncle Ben
- Uncle Sam
- Colonel Sanders
- Ronald McDonald
And many more...
It's almost as if humans are wired to respond to a benevolent spokesperson.
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]
On the subject of touch typing; I’m curious how many people here are touch typists vs not? I am also curious what your thoughts are, if you’re a hunt-and-pecker, of how much that does or does not affect your productivity?
I have this ongoing argument with my kids because they want to hunt-and-peck with one or two fingers per hand and to me that’s like swimming with one arm when you have another arm and two whole legs to use.
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.
Human level comprehension would be a pain for code: there’s a reason why people start writing on a whiteboard when explaining things where the details matter.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We had two full semesters, 5 days a week -- one in seventh grade and one in eight grade, on manual typewriters. What never made sense to me is that my friends who were also into computer programming totally slacked off in the class. Come on guys, you plan on typing for a living, and you have to be here 45 minutes a day anyway; why not just take advantage of the opportunity?
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.
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.
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Mario_Teaches_Typing_1992
^ ... now, can play online in the browser