Mavis Beacon

Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing: A popular program for teaching touch typing on personal computers.

http://www.mavisbeacon.com/

The website above also contains a history of typing, which includes several pages about the early history of the typewriter. One fascinating section contains opinions from the 1870s about new typing technologies:

Others felt that the typewriter was by nature an invasion of privacy. They believed that no man was clever enough to work the machine without a machine operator's help and so even a love letter would have to be transcribed by an invading third party. To make matters worse, a typed petition to the Congress of the United States was loudly and publicly rejected. Under Congressional regulations of the time, only hand-written or lithographed petitions could be submitted for consideration.

---

WWW-Rant:

Going to the website above, and clicking on "The Mavis Store" yields one of the worst error messages I've seen recently:

 (broken image icon)

 ADODB.Field error '800a0bcd' 

 Either BOF or EOF is True, or the current record has been deleted;
 the operation requested by the application requires a current record. 

 /include/storex_inc.asp, line 476 

This kind of information belongs in a log file (one that is actually checked would be nice). The user should just see some kind of "technical difficulties" message, maybe with the ADODB.Field error if they think users would report it.