[Travis McGee]

To: MineralMan

from link...

The IBM Executive typewriter I found at a garage sale was magnificent, and (having been long since replaced by the Selectric), dirt cheap. Only somebody with a PhD in secretarial skills could operate it. It was a proportional spacing machine: an 'm' was five spaces wide, an 'i' was two. There were two separate space bars (two and three spaces respectively). To correct a mistake, you had to know the width of all the characters involved so that you could backspace the appropriate amount (backspace was the only single-space key on the machine). There was an arcane procedure for producing justified type which involved typing a page a first time (while using a special guide to measure where the lines ended), noting the extra spaces that needed to be added, marking the copy to show where two-width spaces would be replaced with three-width spaces (or, in the worst case, two two-width spaces), and typing the page a second time.

60 posted on 09/09/2004 7:24:01 AM PDT by igoramus987

Read the bolded, and tell me if it's within the bounds of reality that this procedure was performed on this arcane machine for a memorandum in the ANG in 1972.

Occam's Razor screams FORGERY! The forger didn't take the proportional spacing into account when he ginned up this fake on his PC.

[Southack]

"Read the bolded, and tell me if it's within the bounds of reality that this procedure was performed on this arcane machine for a memorandum in the ANG in 1972. Occam's Razor screams FORGERY! The forger didn't take the proportional spacing into account when he ginned up this fake on his PC."

Correct. The IBM Executive required a trained clerk to type the memo TWICE to get the proportional font...hardly something that a Lt. Col. is going to do on his own (there are no clerk's initials on the bottom of the memos) for a memo so informal that it didn't even merit TANG letterhead or a CC list.

Moreover, I have yet to see an IBM font from that era that had the small sized superscript "th" character(s). Some clerks knew to roll the page half a line down to get the "th" above the 111 or 147, but getting the "th" to be a small "th" is a different thing entirely with technology from that era.

2 Full Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires

[Poohbah]

You have snatched the pebble from the forger's palm, Honorable Grasshopper!

Chalk up another solid kill for the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy's Digital Brownshirts!

[js1138]

Read the bolded, and tell me if it's within the bounds of reality that this procedure was performed on this arcane machine for a memorandum in the ANG in 1972.

Calm down. The documents in question are not justified. There is a difference between proportional type and justification. You can have either one without the other.

[CobaltBlue]

Justification would mean that the right side lined up, just as the left side lines up. They don't.

Justification would be a complete dead giveaway. The problems are more subtle.

1. Proportional spaced fonts were rare in 1972.
2. Superscripted "th" very rare.
3. I don't recall ever seeing a curly apostrophe from a typewriter.
4. The baselines of the letters line up very smoothly.