CBS: Not Sinking!
Capt. Rather On Bridge!
'Rats Deserting Ship!
Posted on 09/10/2004 7:17:29 PM PDT by goldstategop
Hi Hugh,
I am a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University who has followed the evolution of word processing technology over the past 30 years. A cursory glance at the "Killian documents" shows that they are forgeries, the product of a modern word processing system. Even the most powerful word processing systems available in the early 70's were not designed to produce propotionally spaced documents. Moreover, no mechanical typewriter, even with variable letter widths like the IBM Executive typewriter, could produce precise propotional spacing comparable to a modern word processor. Precise proportional type-setting is a very demanding computational problem. Since modern PC's are more powerful than supercomputers from the 70's, we take this form of computation for granted.
Let me take a moment to recount the state-of-the-art in word-processing in the 1970's. I used a state-of-the-art word processing system to write my undergraduate thesis at Harvard in the spring of 1971. I was one of a handful of Harvard students who were given access to a PDP-10 time-sharing system to conduct my thesis research. I used the same machine to prepare my thesis using a word processing program called "runoff". The output device for "runoff" on the Harvard PDP-10 was a flexowriter, a typewriter-like device driven by punched paper tape. I had to write in the superscripts and subscripts by hand because the flexowriter could not perform fractional line spacing much less proportional font spacing. The runoff program did not support any output devices with proportional spacing. Neither did any other word processing of that era to my knowledge. In the late 1970's, researchers at Bell Laboratories developed a new version of runoff, called troff, to support proportional typesetting on a photo-typesetter; troff is still available today on standard Unix distributions.
So in 1971, even the most powerful available computer systems were not equipped to produce documents like the Killian documents. In Fall 1971, I entered graduate school in Computer Science at Stanford. I soon gravitated to the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which had the most powerful time-sharing system (a PDP-10) on campus. In either 1972 or 1973, Xerox gave the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory a prototype xerographic printer called a "Xerox Graphics Printer (XGP)". Two similar prototypes were given to the MIT Computer Science Department and the Carnegie-Mellon Computer Science Department. The programming staff at the Stanford AI Laboratory was thrilled with the gift because it was the first opportunity that computer science research community had to develop software to support printer quality type-setting. The three Computer Science Departments cooperated in developing the word processing programs to support the XGP. I wrote my first published research paper and my doctoral disseration using the XGP in Spring 1976. It would take another decade before comparable word processing systems were available to most computer science researchers on minicomputers running Unix. It would take nearly another decade before they were widely used on personal computers.
Sincerely,
Robert "Corky" Cartwright Professor of Computer Science Rice University"
I wrote Professor Carwright back and asked if I could reproduce his e-mail on the blog. Before he answered that, he had sent me a second e-mail, as well as one to the DailyKos, who is mounting a very, very lame defense of the CBS forgeries. Here is the Professor's e-mail to Kos:
"Hi Markos,
You are tilting at windmills with the IBM Selectric Composer theory.
Go to http://www.ibmcomposer.org/docs/Selectric%20Composer%20Operations%20Manual.pdf which is a user's manual showing some sample typed text using this typewriter.
The typed text in the "Killian memos" is kerned (check out letter combinations like "fo" and "fe"), but the Composer text is clearly not. Kerning is a computationally complex task beyond the capacity of any mechanical typewriter--even one as expensive and elaborate as the IBM Selectric Composer. Moreover, the proportional spacing in the sample text is rather crude (look at the typesetting of "11" for example) which is the best that a mechanical typewriter--even one as complex as the Composer--can do.
Consult someone who understands the typography behind modern word processing. The "Killian memos" are word processed documents.
Robert "Corky" Cartwright Professor of Computer Science Rice University ACM Fellow
P.S. I would have posted a comment on your site but you have a 24 hour waiting period that prevented it."
Here's the third e-mail, from earlier today:
"Hi Hugh,
I have seen reports that Dan Rather has upped the ante on the authenticity of the Killian documents by insisting that they are authentic. How foolish!
In the testimony that I have seen by forensic experts questioning the authenticity of the documents, they have qualified their opinions by stating that no typewriter familiar to them could have produced the documents. Perhaps they are merely being cautious to safeguard their reputations. But I wonder if these typewriter experts appreciate the computational complexity of modern "print-quality" word processing. No mechanical typewriter could implement the complex sequence of rules governing the formatting of text in a word processor like Microsoft Word.
The Killian memos could not have been typed on an IBM Executive typewriter with "proportional spacing" or any other typewriter using similar technology. According to product descriptions on the web, the IBM Executive typewriter supports only four different character widths. In contrast, modern proportional spacing involves a far more sophisticated type-setting algorithm. Every type font in Word (or any other modern word processing system) has a custom width for every character. Moreover, the spacing between individual pairs of characters is modified by a process called "kerning" that compensates for the fact that letters have varying shapes that affect our perception of proper spacing. To achieve an aesthetically pleasing result, the type-setting process must take into account the relationship between adjacent character shapes. For example, the letter "T" followed by the letter "o" looks badly spaced if the "o" is not tucked under the overhang provided by the top of the "T". On the other hand, no such adjustment is appropriate if the letter "T" is followed by the letter "H". In the Killian documents, you can clearly see the effects of kerning in pairs of letters such as "fo" and "fe".
I am amazed that Dan Rather and his associates at CBS are blind to the overwhelming evidence that these documents are blatant forgeries.
Sincerely,
Robert "Corky" Cartwright Rice University"
Unlike CBS, I did a quick google search on my source, Professor Cartwright, and found him to be who he says he is.
Capt. Rather On Bridge!
'Rats Deserting Ship!
At this point, anyone has more credibility than Rather. What a sleaze-bag, so desperate to bash Bush, he, like the rest of the far-left tyrants, have TO LIE to advance their "cause".
Rather should be held to account as to where those forgeries came from. But of course, the Marx-stream media will NEVER do that --- great journalists, right?? Puke.
Baghdad Bob has more credibilty that Dan Rather.
We shouldn't confuse a MSM news organization (CBS) with facts. \sarcasm
Great posting though.
With all due respect to the professor, everyone knows that personal computers, word processing programs, proportional fonts and kerning were technologies acquired by the government from alien spaceships captured near Roswell, NM. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Texas ANG would have had access to this technology decades before it became available to society at large.
I just saw footage of Rather's defense on tonight's CBS news, on Fox. I thought he seemed really rattled. His eyes were bugging out of his head and he was talking too fast.
Big wow! Thanks for posting this!
Hey, is Rather in competition with baghdad Bob here. "US Forces are pushed out of Baghdad."
I think Bob was slightly more credible
Good post
**I am a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University who has followed the evolution of word processing technology over the past 30 years. A cursory glance at the "Killian documents" shows that they are forgeries, the product of a modern word processing system.**
CBS is busted!
Excellent!
60% of Texans are already planning to vote for Dubya!
Condi Rice is on the Bush payroll.
The NY Times will have a flow chart exposing the Bush-Rice connection.
Lets move on!
LOL at the superscript!
Excellent and persuasive argument. This guy clearly knows whereof he speaks.
Have you seen Registered's new Baghdad Bob New CBS Anchor photoshop?
Does MS Word do automatic kerning? I've never noticed. I know you can control character spacing by clicking on the "Character Spacing" tab from the font dialog, but I didn't think it was automatic
I know in the old days you had to use Pagemaker or something like that to be able to kern.
Finally, are we sure that the forged docs are kerned? If so, how does default word settings duplicate them exactly.
Need I remind you that the Giant Head didn't clear this information to be released.
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