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Softwrights You'll Soon Be Typing... History of the Program

This program has a long history. Although it has been continuously improved, most of it was designed in 1983 (yes, 1983 not 1993) as a home-based, spare time project. Progress was often interrupted by university research and overtime projects at work.

It was first written in interpreted BASIC, ran in 64K of RAM, and used the CGA: 320 by 200, 4-color screen mode. It had numerous features that weren't available in any other products. Key elements of the current program were implemented, including: screen keyboard with all lower and upper case symbols, several keyboard layouts, highlighted keys, hands-on-home, home-to-key line, pacer line, ergonomics lessons, characters erased as they are typed and on/off switches.

The program was later compiled with the ancient BASCOM 1.0 compiler and later versions. Then with QuickBASIC versions 1 thru 4. Line numbers were eliminated and new structured programming features were used.

The author pitifully procrastinated, until he became a full-time, independent, software developer in 1991. For performance and portability, he switched to the C programming language. Ancient features remained, but the program itself was entirely gutted & redesigned to take advantage of C, and the common availability of more than 64K of RAM and higher-than-CGA resolution graphics.

Over the years, several features were removed. Why? To avoid featuritis ... A common disease that afflicts software. Symptoms include needlessly large amounts of features (and commands) and numerous nested menus that keep growing larger and more complex. Featuritis helps feed a growing industry of training courses and how-to-use books for programs that should (or could) be self-explanatory.

One example of such a useless feature in a prototype version of this program was a cutesy gem called TYPE A TUNE ... Complete with a JUKE BOX with a menu of 20 songs to pick from. Music was played as you typed. If you got the tempo right the song would play correctly. Some testers liked this and the author originally thought it was real neat ... So what's the problem? It did nothing to help you learn how to type. In fact it forced you into an unnatural rhythm.

Another example was DUELING TYPISTS where two cartoon characters, complete with hand waves, smiles, and frowns; demonstrated the benefits of good posture and touch typing versus hunt-and-peck typing. It was cute, but it wasted disk and RAM space.

The above were removed, along with the on/off switch that turned the pacer line on and off ... A feature that was designed to be as unobtrusive as possible, anyway! So there was no need for a switch to turn it off. Softwrights hopes that all features are truly useful ... We made a conscious effort to avoid featuritis.

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