Are you a touch typer? I was looking for a link to Mavis Beacon and found the Wikipedia reference to the product. I don't know about you but I was surprised and just a little disappointed to learn that Mavis isn't a real person. Kind of the same way I felt when I found out Jethro Tull and Lynyrd Skynrd weren't real people either. Although Jethro Tull was a real person, just not someone in the band. As you were...
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Leonard Skinner is a real person, too:
http://jacksonville.com/lifestyles/2009-01-21/story/leonard_skinner_honoring_a_namesake
Yeah, I knew that. I left it for someone to research 8-). When I was a lighting roadie in the early 80's I toured with 38 Special, the band Donnie Van Zant started. Ronnie's and Johnny's brother.
It was just in the last year that I was reminiscing with a coworker about how I learned touch typing on an actual typewriter, before the days of Mavis Beacon, and that's when I started wondering what Mavis Beacon was up to these days... which led to the Wikipedia article... and a similar sense of disappointment that you experienced. For twenty years, I had thought Mavis was a real person!
I learned to type in 10th grade on a blue IBM Selectric typewriter that had "undo". It was a ribbon of correction tape that only required you to back up and type the wrong thing again. How high tech for 1978!
I never learnt to type (as in formerly) and kind of regretted it.
Then I saw a room full of professional typists, reporters at a National Newspaper when they were a force to be reckoned with, bashing stuff out at horrendous word per minute rates with two fingers. They seemed to keep the others spare for cigarettes and mugs of what could have been tea but I suspect it wasn't...
After that I got over the "need to type the Beacon way" and developed a sort of touch typing, but not really, style that seems to get me through!
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