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Celebrities like Bill Bixby and Isaac Asimov endorsed hardware from IBM and Tandy, respectively, but few human faces appeared on software boxes. At the time, the computer industry was getting more invested in personalizing their marketing. Perfecting the software was only half the battle.
#Mavis beacon teaches typing 2000 manual#
You didn’t need to have the manual open in order to use it.” “This was before Windows, when pop-up menus were not the norm,” Bilofsky says. If the user wanted to take a break, the software wouldn’t fight them. “The difference was immersion.” If someone missed a word while “driving,” a bug might splatter on the windshield. “We wanted to pick something where we could make that interaction different than anything that had come before,” Abrams says. The same proved true for typing programs, which were numerous but often paid little attention to user interface. Their next major effort, a typing tutorial, would eclipse it.Īccording to Abrams, the company was a “wave rider, not a wave maker.” Chess programs were popular, and Abrams saw opportunity to anthropomorphize it with a mascot of sorts. But he was right.” Chessmaster 2000 was a huge hit for the company. “Les’s marketing was huge,” Bilofsky says. With the photo shoot alone costing $10,000, it was a far cry from the plastic bags of Bilofsky’s past.
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They wouldn’t be playing a faceless algorithm, but a wizened old pro who appeared on the game's box. For Chessmaster 2000, Crane went to considerable effort and expense to imagine a “chess wizard” who would personify the game for players. Bilofsky and his small stable of programmers knew software, while Crane-a former talk show host-knew marketing. When Bilofsky wrote a game called Chessmaster 2000 for Software Country’s Les Crane, the two companies merged, and Crane (who died in 2008) became a partner. Another company, Software Country, solicited his help in putting together a home gaming bundle. “We sold programs in Ziploc bags,” Bilofsky tells Mental Floss.īy the mid-1980s, working together with his cousin Joe Abrams, Bilofsky was ready to move into more commercial pursuits. Presentation and marketing was not a priority. Selling programs that offered type-to-text features uncommon in those days, Bilofsky built up a business around a small circle of personal computer hobbyists in need of productivity programs. Software Toolworks was the name programmer Walt Bilofsky decided to give to his modest software enterprise in 1980.
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But before the typing icon became one of the PC industry’s biggest success stories, Abrams discovered that not all retailers would warm to the idea of a woman of color-even a fictional one-endorsing software.
The company was amused to receive calls requesting interviews or personal appearances by Mavis, a sure sign she was resonating. With Mavis, Software Toolworks developed a digital Betty Crocker-a cheerful, patient, good-humored persona that stood out on retail shelves. Other programs had existed prior to Mavis Beacon, but none had bothered to give their sterile software an identity. In Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, people struggling to adapt to the growing number of personal computers in circulation were led through a series of exercises and lessons intended to improve their typing speed. “A kind of cult developed around this fictitious character.” “She was not a real person, and we never said she was,” Abrams tells Mental Floss. Abrams and his partners had invented her. It had been easy to get Mavis because Mavis didn’t exist. “We’ve been trying to get her for years,” one said. He had somehow been able to secure famed typing instructor Mavis Beacon to endorse his company’s typing tutorial, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. When Software Toolworks co-founder Joe Abrams went to the software convention Comdex in early 1988, he was greeted by industry colleagues offering their congratulations.
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