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Just Found: Lt. Col. Jerry Killian's Typewriter
The Modern Encyclopaedia for Children ^ | 09/10/2004 | TC Rider

Posted on 09/10/2004 3:54:17 PM PDT by TC Rider

Here it is folks, it will do proportional type, variable line spacing, funky little superscripts and it was widely available since 1886. Of course it has 80 keys on the keyboard and foot peddles. Here we see Killian dashing off a shopping list for his wife.

I guess we should just give up now and admit Dan was right.


TOPICS: Political Humor/Cartoons; Your Opinion/Questions
KEYWORDS: killian
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To: MoralSense

Wasn't that what they wanted to do the original "home row" as, but found that it was to efficient and typists were tangling up their strike keys??


61 posted on 09/10/2004 5:21:20 PM PDT by RikaStrom (Quixotic derived from Don Quixote who if he was reincarnated would be John "Quit already" Querry)
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To: TC Rider
ETOIN SHRDLU are the letters in the two right vertical rows. The machine I worked on only had four or five lower case "i" matrices, so if you came across a line with the word "initiation" in it, for example, you had to rewrite the rest of the line. You were flat out.

If for some reason the operator had to produce a couple of slugs for the end of a story, he might simply run his finger down the right hand row of keys -- whoever said this was faster than a typewriter was right about that, it could drop matrices in sequence no matter how fast you ripped a finger across the keys. The result was:

ETOIN
SHRDLU
ETOIN
SHRDLU

62 posted on 09/10/2004 5:24:04 PM PDT by MoralSense
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To: TC Rider

I'm satisfied.
So, who was on Opray today?


63 posted on 09/10/2004 5:25:06 PM PDT by mabelkitty (Watch for a CBS employee in a trench coat going by DeepWord.....)
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To: BJungNan

I got to get me one of those!


64 posted on 09/10/2004 5:26:46 PM PDT by Boazo
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To: TC Rider

Hey! Wait a minute! Isn't that John O'Neill (not Killian) sitting at the machine??? I demand an immediate independent investigation!


65 posted on 09/10/2004 5:27:04 PM PDT by Capricam
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To: dennisw

Well, it could be done by a craftsman printer, but on a very limited basis -- and it wouldn't be true kerning as the term is understood with today's rubber-type tech.

Say you had a biblical verse that began with a drop cap "T", with the descender covering, say, five lines. Well, you could set up the job so that the body type was laid in under the T and you could space out each line to justify left and right with "em" and "en" thins to alter the width of the spaces.

My dad was a jobbing printer and I grew up setting wedding invitations etc. and printing them on a foot-operated platten. It was an astonishly demanding craft and, despite the utility of computer typesetting, we're poorer for the loss of those arcane skills, if only in for the satisfaction of doing a first-rate job by eye, hand, and wit.

What was even harder was writing newspaper headlines in hot metal, especially if you worked for a paper that liked a tight fit on the decks. Screams at edition time if the hed you wrote bounced. Today, you just condense and kern it.


66 posted on 09/10/2004 5:32:08 PM PDT by Kiss Me Hardy
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To: MoralSense
"ETOIN SHRDLU bump. Anybody know that one besides me?"

I have two references for that. First, I believe it was the nonsense string used to indicate the break between two stories. Second, there was a humor writer who used a story line about a cat and a mouse that lived in the composition room and wrote satire at night and this was his tagline but I can't remember names.

I did, however use the IBM Compositor back in 1974, the only possible device that would have produced the kerned, proportional spacing in the memo but not the superscript.

67 posted on 09/10/2004 5:44:41 PM PDT by muir_redwoods
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To: TC Rider

Humor at its best. Thank you!

APf


68 posted on 09/10/2004 6:03:49 PM PDT by APFel
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To: TC Rider

69 posted on 09/10/2004 6:22:27 PM PDT by Boazo
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To: TC Rider

You could always tell a linotype operator, they always had burn marks on their hands and arms from the hot lead that would sometimes shoot out. Heck of a piece of equipment though, an engineering marvel in its time.


70 posted on 09/10/2004 6:26:01 PM PDT by JoeA (JoeA— aka TypeMan)
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To: TC Rider
Just Found: Lt. Col. Jerry Killian's Typewriter

I'm pretty certain this is it....


71 posted on 09/10/2004 6:27:55 PM PDT by Palmetto
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To: MoralSense
"ETOIN SHRDLU bump. Anybody know that one besides me?"

Just remembered the names of the cat and mouse,(see my earlier reply) Archie and Mehetebel. Ring and bells?

72 posted on 09/10/2004 6:30:11 PM PDT by muir_redwoods
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To: gilliam

Wrong. Designed my Stanley Morison for the Times of London in 1931. (I think on a previous thread I said it was Morris Benton--whoops.) Released by Mergenthaler Linotype shortly after.


73 posted on 09/10/2004 6:34:30 PM PDT by JoeA (JoeA— aka TypeMan)
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To: JoeA

Oh, thanks


74 posted on 09/10/2004 6:36:09 PM PDT by gilliam
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To: TC Rider
Three of the four documents shown by CBS were memos that Killian allegedly wrote to himself. So if these were memos to himself, why are the documents shown by CBS obvious xerox copies? They claim they got these documents from Killian's personal file. If that was true, then they would have the original documents and not copies. They've never stated that they have the originals have they? All we've seen were copies...and bad ones at that.

I know as a long-time typist, that some keys in older typewriters had a tendency to cut the paper. Depending on what kind of paper was used, the originals might show slices in the paper made by the keys as they struck the paper. I know for a fact that the letter "l" used to slice into the paper on some, and the "o" key would sometimes cause the center paper of the "o" to be cut cleanly through and fall out. This would also happen with periods, commas, and some number keys.

The fourth document, a memorandum to Lt. Bush, if it indeed was sent to him, there should have been a copy of this memo in his military record file. There wasn't.

If Jerry Killian didn't type as his wife claims, then how does a man who doesn't type, know how to center the heading on a memo, and type consistently and correctly, with no errors or misspellings? I've been typing since 1962, and consider myself pretty fast and accurate, but I still make errors regularly, and if Killian was that good without being a typist, then I must have missed something all these years.

At the moment, Rather is handling all of this the same way Kerry is handling the questions about his military record. Both he and Rather believe they don't have to provide any original documents or records. They want us to just trust them and take them at their word. That only works for a little while.

75 posted on 09/10/2004 6:41:59 PM PDT by mass55th (It's the superscript, stupid!!!!)
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To: dennisw
Early Kerning was reserved for headlines, and the compositor (if he worked on assembling headlines he was a compositor) would assemble the head using large blocks of type (slugs), and after the head was set in lead would carve out the space between the obviously bad combinations, like Y and O or A and V.

When headlines were set using a machine that used a photo process, which I think started in the mid fifties, type kerning became a real possibilty, as did special effects.

Body type, when still set in lead, made do with combinations of characters called ligatures instead of kerning. Ligatures where combinations of letters like t and h, or f and l, and the like. Photo typesetting, using negative images of type stored on glass or film or trasnmitted by CRTs, made kerning possible on text.

When computers began to take over the typesetting business in the early 70s, kerning became widespread before moving to PCs (and by that I mean the Macintosh) in the 80s.

76 posted on 09/10/2004 6:44:30 PM PDT by JoeA (JoeA— aka TypeMan)
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To: JoeA

Thanks much. Very interesting. From time to time it must even have helped squeeze a headline into the alloted space.


77 posted on 09/10/2004 6:49:25 PM PDT by dennisw (Allah FUBAR!)
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To: TC Rider

78 posted on 09/10/2004 6:50:28 PM PDT by Chieftain (Support the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and expose Hanoi John's FRAUD!)
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To: dennisw

I came in at the end of this era, but it was fascinating to see these craftsmen at work. Now everybody with a computer is producing flyers and newsletters, and the results sometimes make my eyes bleed.


79 posted on 09/10/2004 6:52:12 PM PDT by JoeA (JoeA— aka TypeMan)
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To: Kiss Me Hardy

#76 has some good info on kearning that was done in newspaper headlines.


80 posted on 09/10/2004 6:52:21 PM PDT by dennisw (Allah FUBAR!)
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