Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing!

Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing! is a typing tutor released in 1987 by The Software Toolworks for MS-DOS. On oldgame.cz you can run it free in your browser, with no install, and practise touch typing just like in the late eighties.

The worst thing about touch typing? It takes time. The best thing? Once you've learned it, you never lose it. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing from 1987 is out to convince you of that second part, and she does it without beating around the bush — straight in the DOS box.

It's a typing tutor you could buy on floppy disk. The program gradually takes you from individual fingers all the way to writing sentences and entire paragraphs without looking at the keyboard. Mavis Beacon herself — an animated instructor — shows you proper finger positioning and explains the principles. It's not a game in the traditional sense; it's educational software that doesn't really try to be fun.

The mechanics are simple. You see text on screen that you need to type, your fingers fall where they should, and the program counts errors and time. During lessons you learn a new row of keys, then during practice you combine it all. Graphics? Minimal — black background, white text, late-eighties style. Today it would all look sterile, but looking back across the decades, you realize this was absolutely standard for a typing tutor. Nobody expected you to like it — it was supposed to teach you, and it did.

The reason Mavis Beacon is remembered almost forty years after release isn't nostalgia for the graphics. It's because generations of IT professionals who went through this tutorial typed blindly without thinking afterward. The program works because it's brutally effective. There are enough lessons to let you master it, yet they're short enough that it won't bore you to tears — or at least not on day one.

Look at it as an artifact from when typing tutors were sold on disks and once you paid for it, it was yours. Today you can run it in an emulator and experience exactly the same feeling typing teachers had almost forty years ago. If you want to learn to type truly properly — without mistakes and without your fingers dancing all over the keyboard — Mavis Beacon really does deliver.