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. 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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