Back in the 1980s, when my company Zortech was located in London, my partner set up a "Meet Walter Bright" with the tech press there. After all, my picture was on the Zortech ads and the compiler manual.
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.
Ima hafta call baloney on this one ...
If WalterBright was real he would'a wrote a language ... even better than C! Maybe throw in some memory management.
Just sayin'
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.
My friend ordered clothes from an ad only syndicated on Instagram. Initially we all laughed at the concept because a lot of people had seen the ad but know that Facebook Ads is full of people just reselling junk from Alibaba, and so, ignorable. And when its jewelry or clothings, the assumption is that its trust funders selling to their friends, having really no product market fit.
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.
When I first got internet in the 90's I became aware of an art collective that was fronted by a personality name "Netochka Nezvanova". I got the impression that this kind of thing was nothing new. Maybe your last name "Bright" and programming skills were such that they thought you had to be more than one person!
when I finish my next compiler I'm going to hire someone on Fiverr to steal--I mean, alter slightly--the George Brazil Plumbing guy (https://www.google.com/search?q=george+brazil+plumbing&tbm=i...), put him on the website, and call him Walter Bright just to complete the circle
Yeah I suppose for people who read through an entire alphabetical listing, you might be better off being the last thing they remember instead of the first thing they see.
> 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.
I just assumed she was a software developer who decided to teach typing. Then I realized, she doesn’t have to code it herself…maybe she hired someone to program it for her.
It never crossed my mind that she was not an entrepreneur until I read this comment.
Yeah unlike a lot of other fictional characters, she was actually portrayed with photographs, unlike illustrations ala Betty Crocker, Uncle Ben, etc. I think a lot of people thought Mavis Beacon was a real person!
Copying my mate’s work (hi, mjoc101) at uni taught me to type. Too many headaches looking at his printout, my screen, my keyboard, forced me to use whatever tool was available on the uni *nix systems.
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 was required to learn touch-typing to graduate high school. Early 1990s. My incentive was simple; the class was an hour a day of soul-sucking drudgery, for a full academic year, but if I could just eke out 35 wpm on a test, I could avoid the class entirely. I learned typing the spring before my senior year. And passed. Got to leave school an hour earlier every day. I filled the time by taking another math class.
Definitely messenger apps that did it for me. Back in the AOL online CD days!
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.
It could be a geographical thing but my experience of ICQ and MSN was almost entirely 1:1 chat. It was a calmer way to be - no onlookers to impress, and first-class support for signalling that you’re not at your computer right now so maybe they should message later.
This is my experience too. The standout memory for me is staying up till the wee hours of the morning chatting with the girl I'd end up dating for the last couple years of highschool.
The US isn’t some kind of Nazi state. Black people holding professional jobs has been considered culturally acceptable for many decades. (And this by no means proves that racism doesn’t exist).
That makes sense. Polling in the early 90's showed half the country was against black/white interracial marriages, but no one had a problem with a black secretary/typist (which did not disrupt the "social hierarchy" in people's minds)
And let's be serious, this is a fictional black typist. Secretary isn't the most high-status job. Teacher is a bit more status (she's a typing teacher!), but typist could also mean data entry, which is significantly worse.
The US has never had a problem with black servants, but that's not a indicator of not being racist.
My hypothesis is that the groups that were typically associated with steadfast racist views were typically technically illiterate, so this intersection with Mavis Beacon just didn’t happen.
"America is racist" is a narrative sold by racists to sow racial division.
Shirkey's principle. Any institution (or career race-baiter) tasked with solving a problem will instead preserve the problem so they can continue to solve it.
There’s a significant divide between “America is racist” and “America was founded on, and still preserves, many institutions that are fundamentally biased against some people.”
I don’t know many people who seriously claim that every single atom of American life is racist.
No actual person thinks this but it’s the take away when you compress it down to memes / read about it in media.
America has no room for nuance, it’s either every police shooting is justified or every shooting isn’t justified. It’s probably not a great way to actually run a country but it makes for great media sales / entertaining politics.
No the internet can do that just fine, the twitterization of social media in to short quippy "bumper sicker" took the worst aspects of politics (sound bites and bumper stickers") and normalized that in to the "correct" way to debate or discuss topics.
Gone where the long form threaded topics of forums, usenet, etc, replaced with 180 characters quips
I will agree that twitter irrevocably has changed the online landscape. But I believe it's the ability to instantly transmit things that has pushed towards shorter and shorter content. For example Vine really took off, and now you have Tiktok/Instagram reels/etc. Not to mention Snapchat/Periscope.
It's a lot faster to digest and get a dopamine hit from a <140 char tweet (now <380 chars) than poring over a book, so the outcome of twitter was destined to happen.
I think a subtle distinction has to be made: being labelled a racist became the worst thing ever. Which has led to absurd scenes where someone conducts themselves in blatantly racist ways and then says "That's not who I am". It has become a noun, rather than a verb
I think the meta-commentary re: the current zeitgeist of misinformation and nonsense. Being inspired to write a comment like this is probably more revealing of human character.
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".
I think something is lost in translation here, the OP is saying that emotionally it doesn't matter to them if she wasn't real, they still hold her in high regard.
They are not saying, "I have no interest in this."
I think you missed the point of the comment. I don't think this is a lack of interest in the topic per se -- it's demonstrating that when using the software, there was a clear separation between the 'teacher' and just using the software. I had no idea she was a 'real' person (or interpreted as such anyways) and always presumed it was just a 'character'.
"They taught me how to type" sounds a lot more like fond recollection than disinterest to me, but I guess we all read things differently. Your way seems needlessly uncharitable, though!
I had no idea there was a potential "real person" there any more than I thought Mario/Luigi were real. Maybe I'd never even seen an image or box to make that connection? I remember that the software was really useful early on -- and game modes even made it a bit competitive.
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.
When I was very young I assumed that Pink Floyd was some dude's name and that he probably started the band because he wanted to prove that just because his name was Pink didn't mean he was girly.
They kind of make that joke in 'Have a Cigar' on Wish You Were Here.
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?
I've never heard that the character was "based on" Mario Segale, just named after him.
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.
This is my experience, too. We had a computer lab full of us learning using Mavis Beacon (1999-2003), and there was no indication in the software that Mavis Beacon was supposed to be a person's name. We just hopped on Mavis Beacon just like we did with Word or Visual Basic.
On a somewhat related note, if you’re teaching your kids typing the current Mavis Beacon software has broken DRM purchased straight from Amazon. I was told by their support to buy it again directly from their website. I recommend the much superior Typing.com
It was a somewhat popular name for girls in the 30s and 40s. Mavis Beacon came out in the late 80s, one of the programmers might well have had a mother or aunt named Mavis.
Out of curiosity, have you ever publicly referred to the Society of the Spectacle more than 3 months ago? For whatever reason, I am seeing all sorts of references all over the internet to Debord and SotS in the past couple months, and I'm just trying to track down why this is happening. I don't think this is a yellow car phenomenon because I've been into Situationism for the past 20 years and am fairly attuned to references to it that I stumble across.
I think the "Contain" podcast (https://podbay.fm/p/contain-podcast) got me into it originally. It has a lot of guests who reference stuff like "commodity fetishism" and I just started looking that up to figure out what they were talking about and this eventually led to Debord.
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?
Just giving context to why Debord is apart of the zeitgeist these days. And Society and the Spectacle is certainly a reactionary text; no surprise it is read by other reactionaries.
An explanation for recent popularity. I was confused out of my mind when the entire country started talking about Saul Alinsky all of a sudden, until I heard that an alcoholic right-wing crackpot was screaming about him while drawing on a blackboard nightly on television.
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.
Mavis Beacon taught my how to type between 60-75 wpm. The dictate feature of Microsoft Word within Office 365 gets me roughly to 100 wpm after corrections.
Bottom line: Mavis Beacon helped me code faster, but Microsoft helped me write blogs faster.
This is always interesting to me: I find that I can't dictate at all, I need to see the words and read them as I'm writing them, for some reason. Especially for writing fiction, it's just hard to imagine saying it out loud, I feel like that would engage a different and "wrong" part of my brain.
When I am coding, I feel the need to "type it out."
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.
I'm in my 30s and I grew up at a time in grade school when computers and internet access were just becoming more and more popular, but typing wasn't specifically a necessity for school.
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.
I've used QWERTY, Dvorak, Colemak, and CarpalX (and even Workman for a short while) and have been using CarpalX as primary for nearly the last decade. I'd say it doesn't really matter at all which you learn first as by far the vast majority of what you learn is the motor skills which transfer to using any layout. Learning a particular layout after you've already learned how to type takes a miniscule amount of time in comparison (on the order of 1-2 weeks of use to reach full proficiency as the original layout regardless of the level of proficiency that was) while knowing QWERTY remains a handy fallback given it's never just going to disappear overnight.
> There's no good evidence that Dvorak is better for either speed or RSI.
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.
The claim I'd make in favour of Dvorak is that it's much more comfortable than QWERTY, without an impactful drop in speed. (Though, after using Dvorak for long enough, it's about as fast as QWERTY for me).
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).
>"wow, it looks like your hand is doing nothing, but you're typing 90 wpm".
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.
So what? There's no good evidence for QWERTY and it's based on assumptions about mechanical typewriters that are no longer true whereas Dvorak is at least based on something that applies to modern life.
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.
Well, if you do something that doesn’t match what 90% (or for Dvorak, more like 99.99%) of society does, especially if it is in a way that is incompatible, you end up having to do both ways or suffer significant friction in everyday life if it is a common skill or requirement.
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 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.
If anyone else is confused by some of the years in the article, I have submitted the following to The Independent:
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.
Real or not, I owe Mavis my touch typing ability.
It's kinda like the "are we in a simulation" argument - does it matter if we are, if we can touch type like Mavis Beacon?
I remember at some point in middle school in the early 90s we had typing instruction in the form of some sort of car drag racing video game. It was actually quite fun and motivated me to type correctly! The faster and more accurately you typed, the faster your car went. And you could use the money you won from winning to upgrade you car, or purchase faster ones.
Unfortunately, I never learned to touch type though I'm pretty fast so long as I'm not copying something. I don't think I ever touched a typewriter until senior year in high school and touch typing never seemed a sufficient priority to me to deliberately learn it. (Shorthand would probably have been useful too at various times.)
I used to think the same. When I was in my 20s, I could type super-fast with 4-6 fingers. But then old age hit. My hand-eye coordination and reflexes slowed down, along with typing speed. I'm slowly learning to touch type, and it helps tremendously.
> Incarnating Mavis was a Haitian-born woman called Renee L’Esperance, spotted behind a cosmetics counter at Saks Fifth Avenue by one of the men behind the company that sold Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.
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.
Is this really a topic you've interrogated your friends about? Why would you know anyone's perspective on Mavis Beacon?
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.
Firstly, I think we all need to take a deep breath a step back. You’re coming at me very aggressively, I don’t know what trauma I exposed for you, but please forgive me.
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.
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.
She was captured in Argentina attempting to steal Iguazu Falls [0]. Fortunately a couple of super sleuths [1] were tipped off about the soon-to-be caper by none other than Dr. Brain [2].
All these people want to know, "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?"
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.
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