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<p>For a couple of days now we've been talking about whether the CBS memos could have been produced using the technology available in 1972 and 1973. We've talked about two typewriters mainly, both widely used at that time: the IBM Executive series and the IBM Selectric series.</p>

Someone else mentioned a website that is dedicated tot the IBM Selectric Composer. The link above will take you to that website. Besides being around four times more expensive to purchase than a regular IBM Selectric the website had a bit of information about the IBM Selectric Composer that hasn't been mentioned in anything I've seen so far. It seems you have to type everything twice perfectly when you use the Composer. Here is that section from the ibmcomposer.org website: click here "The first IBM Composer was the IBM "Selectric" Composer announced in 1966. It was a hybrid "Selectric" typewriter...

September 11, 2004 MEMO TO: AIR FORCE OFFICE OF SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS RE: POSSIBLE FRAUDULENT AIR FORCE (AIR NATIONAL GUARD) DOCUMENTS As an American citizen, I am requesting an investigation by the AFOSI into the production and use of documents by CBS News which appear to be probable fraudulent representations of Air Force (Air National Guard) documents. This matter is of particular concern since the contents of the documents are being used by Mr. Daniel Rather in an apparent attempt to defame the Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States. This activity may also considered as an attempt to...

Talked back and forth with a typewriter collector named Chuck who lives in Redlands, CA. He happened to have a working IBM Selectric Composer Typewriter circa 1972! Here is the scoop I got from him.... IBM had a Roman font element, he said it was called "Aldine Roman." The element I guess is what we been calling a golf ball on here! He said it is very similar to MS New Roman, in fact ALMOST identical. BUT, he said the IBM element Roman font had a observable difference in the capital C. He says he does not see a IBM...

Whenever the topic has turned to the Selectric Composer, it has been dismissed out-of-hand as being far too expensive an item to find in an office on an Air National Guard base: The machine sold for anywhere from $3,600 to $4,400, and fonts were extra and not cheap. Furthermore, the Composer was widely agreed to be far too complicated and slow a machine to use for typing up memoranda, especially ones that were destined to go into a file and not even be distributed. But the nagging question remained: Could an IBM Selectric Composer have been used to produce these...

. . . Though the question has hardly been conclusively answered, the consensus of opinion among interested parties seems to be that neither an Executive nor a Selectric could have produced these memos. My purpose here is not to debate the relative merits of either of those typewriters; that discussion is happening elsewhere. Rather, I want to take a moment to consider the dark horse candidate, the one piece of equipment that is widely believed to have been capable of producing a document similar to these memos, but that has been dismissed as being so improbable an alternative as to...

update: I dragged my Executive up from the basement, it's not working too well...but I did type some of the 19 may 72 memo. It doesn't fit on the page using a real vintage proportional spacing typewriter...and it looks different.

Sorry, but due to excessive hits, this page is temporarily out of service.  Please check back after the election. For those who want my opinion...the documents appear to be done in Word, and then copied repeatedly to make them "fuzzy".  They use features that were not available on office typewriters the 1970s, specifically the combination of proportional spacing with superscript font.  The IBM Executive has proportional spacing, but used fixed type bars.  The Selectric has changeable type elements, but fixed spacing (some models could be selected at 10 or 12 pitch, but that's all).  The Selectric Composer was not an...

IBM announces the Electromatic Model 04 electric typewriter, featuring the revolutionary concept of proportional spacing. By assigning varied rather than uniform spacing to different sized characters, the Type 4 recreated the appearance of a printed page, an effect that was further enhanced by a typewriter ribbon innovation that produced clearer, sharper words on the page. The proportional spacing feature became a staple of the IBM Executive series typewriters.

Bob Evans, Who Helped I.B.M. Transform Data Processing, Dies at 77 By LAURIE J. FLYNN Published: September 8, 2004 Bob O. Evans in the early 1970's. ARTICLE TOOLS E-Mail This Article Printer-Friendly Format Most E-Mailed Articles Reprints & Permissions TIMES NEWS TRACKER   Topics Alerts Deaths (Obituaries) Computers and the Internet International Business Machines Corporation ob O. Evans, a computer scientist who in the 1960's led the development of a new class of mainframe computers - the famous 360's - helping turn I.B.M. into a data-processing power, died on Thursday in Hillsborough, Calif. He was 77.The cause was sudden heart failure,...

A timeline history of the IBM Typewriter with old ads to show what the machines looked like. Click on the thumbnail to see an enlargement of that ad. http://www.etypewriters.com/history.htm

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM - news) late on Wednesday rolled out a new version of its database software aimed at users of Linux (news - web sites) and Unix (news - web sites) operating systems that it hopes will help the company take away market share from market leader Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq:ORCL - news). IBM said the latest version of its DB2 software that runs on Linux and Unix automatically self-manages databases, allowing companies to better manage, process and retrieve data such as product pricing. Armonk, New York-based IBM said that the latest database software,...

A US FIRM said that it has delivered two single board computers which are candidates for the US Air Force Research Labs' space science mission. Computers in space are bombarded by particles that can destroy the electronics. But, said Maxwell Technologies, the SCS750 includes component shield technology and system level architecture that indicate an error rate of less than one in 10,000 years. That's a long time. The SCS750 uses three Power PC 750FM chips which simultaneously run the same program and check with each other, "voting" on each operation. If one of the CPUs "disagrees" with the other two,...

Since eWeek content is banned on FR, I'll try to summarize: Revenue reported: $11.2 Million SCOSource Licensing Revenue: $678,000. The increase came from only two unnamed customers. Net loss for the quarter: $7.4 Million "SCO has been finding it "very difficult to get new customers" and is focusing on keeping its installed base." "To help manage its finances, SCO is renegotiating its legal fees agreement with its primary IBM litigator, the law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP. In this revised fee agreement, in return for giving the law firm as much as 33 percent of any settlement awards...

Tired of being portrayed as the bad guys of IT, Kieran O'Shaughnessy, director of SCO Australia and NZ, last week declared "we are not the anti-Christ of cyberspace" but a defender of Unix fighting the monolithic power of IBM. Claiming SCO's business was stolen by "foul means", O'Shaughnessy said the company didn't just go out and pick a fight with IBM, but was backed against a wall and had to fight back. "The only reason we are [pursuing a lawsuit against IBM] is to defend our Unix business; we are not a litigation company, we are about Unix on Intel,"...

IBM asked a federal court to bar the SCO Group, a Linux adversary, from distributing any Linux software, in the latest filing in their ongoing legal battle. In a motion for partial summary judgment filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, IBM asks the court to rule in favor of its counterclaim alleging SCO has violated the terms of one of the most common licenses under which Linux software is distributed. An IBM representative declined to comment beyond the text of the motion. An SCO representative said the company disputed IBM's allegations and would respond soon in...

IBM Files For Partial Summary Judgment on 8thCounterclaim (Copyright Infringement) -PDF and text Wednesday, August 18 2004 @ 06:37 PM EDT Man, this just isn't SCO's week. IBM has just filed *another* Motion for Partial Summary Judgment, this one on its 8th Counterclaim, the one for copyright infringement. No, silly, not IBM copying SCO. It's where IBM says that SCO has literally copied more than 783,000 lines of code from 16 packages of IBM's copyrighted material. They are asking for summary judgment as to liability and a permanent injunction. Here's the lesson. You don't ever want IBM legally mad at...

IBM last week stepped up its attack against SCO by filing a motion to dismiss SCO's contract claims with the US District Court in Salt Lake City, Utah. The 100 page document aims right at SCO's claims around the control of "derivative works" produced off of the Unix System V code base. SCO has long asserted that IBM did not have the right to make additions to Unix and then chuck them into Linux source code. In its filing, IBM says this line of thinking is absurd given its old Unix contracts with AT&T and given SCO's decision to ship...

IBM Goes For the Jugular -- Files Motion For Partial Summary Judgment on Contract Claims! Monday, August 16 2004 @ 11:16 AM EDT Here is IBM's Redacted Memorandum in Support of Motion for Partial Summary Judgment On Breach of Contract Claims, filed by IBM on Friday. It's a hundred-page document. As you will see, they are going for the jugular now. Astoundingly, they say that all parties involved in the contract between AT&T and IBM have now provided testimony in discovery that IBM has the right to do whatever it wishes with its own code, contrary to SCO's claims, or...

NEWS    IBM says it won't assert patents against Linux kernelBig Blue exec challenges IT to establish procedures to avoid infringement claims   By  Ed Scannell August 04, 2004  SAN FRANCISCO -- In his keynote address on Wednesday at LinuxWorld, IBM Senior Vice President of Technology and Marketing Nick Donofrio assured the Linux nation his company would not assert its formidable patent portfolio against the Linux kernel and strongly advocated others to promise the same. Donofrio's remarks were in response to a statement earlier this week from the Open Source Risk Management organization based on its research and initial analysis of...