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September 10, 2004

Find a typewriter

On the off chance that the 60 Minutes II memos are legit, it really should not be hard to obtain a typewriter from the early 1970's that could produce a credible facsimile. I say this because:

  • I posess an early 80's IBM Selectric, so they're not all gone;
  • There are collectors of these things;

    • and
  • Any typewriter capable of proportional spacing in 1972 would have been of a very advanced type, and therefore highly collectible.
I was going to link to the IBM Selectric Museum website, but they seem to have exceeded their bandwidth quite recently, and have instead posted this:
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 office typewriter, but apparently did use proportional spacing. These were very expensive machines, used by printing offices, not administrative offices.....

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.
UPDATE: Here is the info on the IBM Composer line, which some claim might have typed the memos. Is this really something that one would find on a Texas Air Force National Guard base? And if so, would someone use it for memos? You decide.

Posted by Kevin Murphy at September 10, 2004 09:00 AM | TrackBack
Comments

I would think that the Texas National Guard or Texas Air Guard would have a monthly publication for members that would be done then in a proportional font and that it might have one of these machines for that purpose.

It's certainly possible that one could have been used for these memos.

Posted by: f bar at September 12, 2004 04:46 AM

Well, anything's "possible."

But then someone would:
1) have a recollection of such a machine at the Guard base (and no, a memo that "the military" was considering buying one won't do)
2) be able to find such a newsletter
3) find ANY other document that what created on said machine and is provably from the Texas Air National Guard of that era.

But, after reading the manual for the Selectric Composer version available in 1972, after hearing from one owner of an IBM Executive who tried and failed to come close to the document, and after viewing the various MS Word reproductions, I really, really doubt it.

Occam's Razor says it's a fraud. Common sense says it's a fraud. If this was a Republican document, you'd be screaming it was a fraud.

You are grasping at straws. A jury would convict on this evidence.

Posted by: Kevin Murphy at September 12, 2004 09:40 AM