Touch-typing – or keyboarding, as it is more commonly called nowadays – involves using all the fingers in a standard pattern to hit the correct keys without looking at them. Back in the day, typing ...

Generations learned to type using the Mavis Beacon software—and had no idea she wasn’t a real person. But what about the model used for her image, who vanished from the public eye? Editor-at-Large, ...

Maybe you remember the grainy, pixelated nonsense letters to be copied down as fast as possible. Maybe you remember the gentle reminders to “Use all five fingers!” or “Try not to look at the keyboard.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or ...

But who is the woman behind the program? As Adrienne Hankin, public relations director for tech company Mindscape, told the New York Times in 1998: "Mavis is the Betty Crocker of software" Though the ...

“Seeking Mavis Beacon” is a documentary about (stick with me here) seeking Mavis Beacon. But, what it is not (and stick with me here, too) is a documentary about finding Mavis Beacon. Because whether ...

Jazmin Jones knows what she did. “If you’re online, there’s this idea of trolling,” Jones, the director behind Seeking Mavis Beacon, said during a recent panel for her new documentary. “For this ...

Though the name "Mavis Beacon" might not mean much to modern-day kids, to those who came of age in the late 1980s and 1990s, it surely does. "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing" was a software program ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. If you learned to type in the 1980s or ’90s, there’s a decent chance you had some help from Mavis Beacon. The fictional avatar was ...