The IBM Executive typewriter used proportional fonts, and was a staple in the military.
It was first introduced in the late 1950s.
It was first introduced in the late 1950s.
OK......Someone needs to research whether the specific font used in these memos existed on the IBM at the time.
Who can do this?
Fair point, sinkspur---however the PowerLine blog entry has further evidence that this is a forgery. Check it out!
For example, the use of the small "th" to represent 147th...
Be careful with this. The IBM Executive typewriter used proportional fonts, and was a staple in the military. It was first introduced in the late 1950s.
Did it have the superscript "th", as shown in the body of the letter in "111th"? I used them many years ago (late 70s and on), but don't recall.
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.
I'm certainly no expert but there are proportional fonts -- where letters such as "i" take up less horizontal width than "w" but there is also something called "kerning" in which letter shapes are taken into consideration when spacing is done. Under kerning, it is possible for one letter to "intrude" into the horizontal space of another where say an "A" is next to a "W" as in "AW".
I don't know for sure, but I doubt proportional font typewriters would be capable of kerning as they would need to "know" what letter had preceded the one being typed.
Looking at the first memo, it appears that kerning was employed in the word "May" where the tail of the "y" appears to curl beneath the serif on the "a".
I owned a Selectric in the early 70s, so yes, they were common.
That being said, the discrepancy in signatures seems too great for it to be the same. Also, if Killian had a Selectric in 1972, why was he back to a mechanical monospace typewriter a year later?
Did the Selectric or Executive have "curly quotes"?
Not exactly.
Later models of Selectrics replaced inked fabric ribbons with "carbon film" ribbons that had a dry black or colored powder on a "once-thru" clear plastic tape. These could be used only once but they were in a cartridge that was simple to replace. They also introduced auto-correction, where a sticky tape in front of the print ribbon could remove the black-powdered image of a typed character, and introduced selectable "pitch" so that the typewriter could be switched among pica ("10 pitch"), elite ("12 pitch"), and sometimes agate ("15 pitch"), even in one document. Even so, all Selectrics were monospaced -- each and every character was the same width. Although IBM had produced a successful typebar-based machine, the IBM Executive, with proportional spacing, no proportionally-spaced Selectric office typewriter was ever introduced. There was, however, a much more expensive proportionally-spaced machine called the Selectric Composer which was considered a typesetting machine rather than a typewriter.