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Friday, September 10, 2004

Gutenberg Is Smiling in his Grave Today
Posted by Jill | 9:48 AM

Somewhere Johann Gutenberg is smiling at the hue and cry over whether the CBS memos could possibly have been created in 1972, and the attendant minute examination of the fontography therein. Atrios shows a highly inconvenient ad from the 1940's demonstrating that typewriters with proportional fonts were available then, and here's a Wikipedia entry showing that the IBM Selectric typewriter, which featured interchangeable typeballs which allowed different fonts to be used, was released in 1961. Atrios also links to the user manual for the IBM Composer, which was released in 1966. And Etypewriters.com even lists the entire history of typewriters here.

Best of all, a messageboard poster, "Bob", at Democrats.com shows the difference between the CBS memos and what Microsoft Word (which is what the Freepers and the Bush Brownnosers at Fox, MSNBC, and CNN are claiming were used in their contention that the documents are forgeries) would create.

None of this proves that the documents are not forgeries, but it does debunk the notion that such technology was not available in 1972.

Ah, kids. They think anything more than 10 years ago might as well be the late Cretaceous period.

UPDATE: This document from the Air Force Data Systems Design Center shows that in April 1969, "Service Test was completed for the International Business Machines (IBM) “Selectric” typewriter and Magnetic Tape “Selectric” Composer."

So much for the idea that this couldn't possibly be legitimate.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Amygdala has more. Sterling Newberry has
an exhaustive analysis all pointing to the documents' legitimacy.

IT SLICES IT DICES IT BURNS FAT 3X AS FAST BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE: Poster "BillG NYC" at Washington Monthly says,

Kevin, I worked in the IBM Office Products Division field service area fixing typewriters in NYC for over 13 years in the 70s. I can tell you that the Model D can produce those documents, not only did it do proportional spacing, you could order any font that IBM produced AND order keys that had the aftmentioned superscripted "th." Also you could order the platen, thats the roller that grabs the paper, in a 54 tooth configuration that produced space, space and a half and double spacing on the line indexing, this BTW was popular in legal offices. The Model D had to be ordered from a IBM salesmen and was not something that was a off the shelf item, typical delivery time were 4-6 weeks.

Also, typewriter keys were changed in the field all the time, its not that hard to do. I wish I had saved my service and parts replacement manuals to backup this claim but I'm guessing a call to IBM with a request for a copy of their font and parts replacement manuals would put this to rest ASAP.
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