The Irish education software company Riverdeep Group said it had agreed to buy the educational assets of the Learning Company, whose brands include Reader Rabbit, Carmen Sandiego and the Mavis Beacon typing series, for $40 million in stock.
My 12-year-old son (who won't use the Mavis Beacon typing tutor program I bought him, but that's a different story) would benefit from speech software, but it couldn't understand him at all.
Compared to beacon-type approaches, this approach only requires a single conjugation, and therefore enables a more facile synthesis.
And typing to spell is nothing new — before Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, there was the Speak & Spell speech synthesizer (famously featured in the movie "E.T").. I've been touch-typing since the age of five, and if you asked me today to remember one of my many passwords, I would have to mimic typing on a keyboard to get it right.
While there were actual great PC games out about killing Nazis, killing space demons, and killing it at puzzle-solving, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing! wasn't so much a game as, well, a system for teaching you how to type without looking at the keyboard.
In 1980, Mr. Crane went into the burgeoning computer software business, becoming chairman of the Software Toolworks, whose successes included "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing".
That's clearly the vision behind Copytalk, a weird and exciting new service from Norman Worthington, the man who brought you Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and the Miracle Piano Teaching System.
Houghton Mifflin itself was sold last year by its owners — Bain Capital, Thomas H. Lee Partners and the Blackstone Group — to Riverdeep, based in Ireland, which makes Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and the Oregon Trail, for $3.4 billion including debt.
All Sonny needs to make hits is MS_DOS, SkiFree, and a copy of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.
