At its release in 1986, CompuKeys was THE premier application for teaching keyboarding from the elementary to high school level on the Apple II family of computers. It included many advanced features like class and student management, accurate timings (the Apple had no timeclock!), correction of errors like a real typing teacher, word wrap, etc. It also featured animated graphics of all hand positions and games to develop speed and accuracy in typing.
CompuKeys was developed by a team of people from 1984-1986:
- Gary N. McLean is a Professor of Business Education at the University of Minnesota, St. Paul. Dr. McLean with years experience in teaching keyboarding/typewriting (including his own six children) and conducting research on the subject. He has authored numerous articles and given hundreds of presentations on keyboarding. He has authored several textbooks, as well as a monograph on TEACHING KEYBOARDING/TYPEWRITING. Dr. McLean has served as a consultant on keyboarding to numerous school districts and corporations. He has also served as a consultant on other keyboarding software materials.
- Ronald R. Geiser an educational programmer for a large computer consortium since 1981. He specializes in tutorial, management, and authoring systems. His objective has been to set new user-friendly standards for each system he has programmed. His experience includes tutorial, management, and authoring systems for English, physical education, computer literacy, and keyboarding.
- Timothy F. Cimbura has been programming since the beginning of the Apple computer in 1977. His experience and talents lie especially in the graphics and sound aspects of programming. His major accomplishment is the character generator APEXTEXT, which is currently being used in many educational packages worldwide. Mr. Cimbura is also president of Apex Software, publisher of APEXTEXT.
- David C. Lindgren has a Masters degree in Business Education and is a teacher at Hudson Senior High School in Hudson, Wisconsin. Mr. Lindgren has been teaching business education, including keyboarding, for many years. He has extensive experience in using microcomputer courseware. Mr. Lindgren has used several keyboarding software packages, in his classrooms.
- Joyce Lindgren wrote all the documentation, content, and screens.
- Jerry Farm also contributed to application programming.
You may run the demo below using an Apple IIe emulators for the Macintosh or PC. Virtual II by Gerard Putter is the best emulator I’ve found.
Developed in 1985, it was still in use 15 years later!
“Our school has been using CompuKeys for the past 10 years on our Apple IIs. However, this year we got rid of those computers and we still want to use the CompuKeys program. Is there anyway we can use the software on our Macs?” – Cheryl Lenz – Spencer, WI, April 2000
Here is a demo of the software.
Full disk images for the system as well as 6502 Assembly code listings are available. The core software used for all screen graphics was ApexText.