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To: liberallarry
you present as proven things that were, and still are, under dispute such as the stuff about the "th" and whether or not the TANG could have afforded typewriters capable of producing the "memos".
My professional career was in an office in a defense contractor. I saw tons of memos in my day. And before the advent of word processing I never saw a memo which could possibly have been confused with a product of Microsoft Word. Nobody was using a machine of the complexity which would have supported that sort of quality; if you had seen that sort of document back in the early/mid seventies you would have instantly taken it for the product of a print shop.

It would have been absurd to pay the price of a car for a "typewriter" capable of that, and it would have been absurd to take the trouble to operate such a complex machine for a memo. And some of these "memos" purport to have been written to file. Not meant to see the light of day, and yet they were made on the most complicated to use typewriter in the office that they had no reason to have in the office?

More likely than buying a white elephant like that, TANG might have gotten a hand-me-down typewriter from the USAF. And don't even think of trying to convince me that Killian typed those "memos" himself on such a complex machine. Killian's family says he didn't type - and my experience of such a meliu was that engineers didn't type either. I was one, and had taken a typing course in HS thinking it would help me in college. And I found that you "positioned" yourself in a bad way if you ever laid hand on a typewriter in the office. And a test pilot told me he had the selfsame experience, only worse.

On top of that, the Air Force used 8-inch wide paper back then. If you laid out a memo to look right on that size of paper, what would it look like when copied it onto eight-and-a-half by eleven paper? And wouldn't it be off-center?

Those "memos" were made on Microsoft Word, long after their putative dates. They were made by someone who had some experience of military correspondence but who was not immersed in Air Force culture circa 1973. They were not closely held for three decades, then suddenly copied promiscuously (as would be indicated by the poor quality of the copy) without reaching anyone but Bill Burkett. They were made in 2004 by Bill Burkett or someone he knows personally, and they were deliberately reduced in quality by repeated copying of copy of a copy, to obliterate any possiblity that experts could be certain that the signatures were bogus.

If TANG had had a machine capable of emulating Microsoft Word, the products of that machine would not have been limited to four memos about a lowly Lieutenant, however well-connected.


215 posted on 09/20/2005 12:35:45 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (The idea around which liberalism coheres is that NOTHING actually matters but PR.)
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To: conservatism_IS_compassion

I can't argue with you about this. I don't have similar, relevant personal experience. All I did was read what "experts" had to say...and was unable to draw any definite conclusions.


219 posted on 09/20/2005 1:23:41 PM PDT by liberallarry
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To: conservatism_IS_compassion
They were made by someone who had some experience of military correspondence but who was not immersed in Air Force culture circa 1973

True. That is why they used memo formats that the USAF established in the early 1990s. Whoever wrote those things was unaware of the old formats that were used in 1972.

229 posted on 09/20/2005 6:50:03 PM PDT by TankerKC (The Media turn each tactical victory for insurgents into a strategic victory for terrorists.)
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