"O.K., that's step one. Now, does anyone know or can anyone point to instructions on how the Executive worked? If it was a giant pain, like the Composer, it would be very unlikely that anyone in Bush's Guard office sat around all day typing memos to their personal files with it. However, if the proportional spacing was incredibly easy to use, then the documents would be more likely to be authentic.
"
I don't have a manual, but I did use the Executive. Proportional printing was automatic. You just typed. Now, if you wanted to justify, you had to type the document twice, and figure out where to put the spacing so the lines would end in the same place. That was a pain. But typing this memo would have been just like typing it on any other typewriter.
"The experts also raised questions about the military's typewriter technology three decades ago. Collins said word processors that could produce proportional-sized fonts cost upwards of $20,000 at the time.
"I'm not real sure that you would have that kind of sophistication in the office of a flight inspector in the United States government," Showker said.
"The only thing it could be, possibly, is an IBM golf ball typewriter, which came out around the early to middle 1970s," Haley said. "Those did have proportional fonts on them. But they weren't widely used."