My huge vanity post, on the CBS fake Killian memos!

Me | 9/09/04 | Me

[Oblongata]

I have to just take a minute to do some bragging here. I apologize in advance.

Last night I was reading FR as this story broke. I submitted a tip on the drudgereport page, and sent this email to drudge at 2:42am :

"http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1210702/posts

The documents CBS supplied recently are written in a PROPORTIONALLY SPACED font.

If you can figure out how Lt. Col. Jerry Killian managed to produce a document like that, on a typewriter in 1972, I would like to hear it.

The only typewriter capable of proportional fonts at the time, was an IBM Executive. Secretaries had to go to school to learn how to use these. Each line had to be typed twice. They cost a fortune.

In other words, this is not the typewriter a Lt. Col. would use to type a personal memo.

Regards,

Oblongata "

I also mentioned the superscript feature in the May 4th memo in the submitted tip.

This just proves the power of FR and the internet. None ofthis would have been possible without the dedicated work of all you FReepers. We must keep the poressure on!

[daviddennis]

I spot-checked a few of them.

"Purple Heart #1 Citation" was typed badly on a fixed-space typewriter, probably a pretty bad one. Bad typing means: Many of the letters with closed forms were partially filled in. Many of them were not lined up with the baseline.

"Request for Swift Boat Duty" - same.

Reserve Office Appointment is a form. Same typing exactly.

Office Order Memos. Mainly forms. Typing is better, with most characters aligned at the baseline. But many letters are still partially filled in and not clear. The font is fixed-width.

I think that's enough to make my point. There would have been no reason to have had a typewriter capable of printing with variable width fonts in the Navy and I see no evidence to believe otherwise.

D

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

Lots of typewriters had superscript features, problem is that they simply shifted the same size font up and did not conjoin them. The experts also point to the perfect word wrapping without hyphens on all documents, possible on one document but not likely on all. Also all letters are perfectly even up, down, and sideways. Typewriters will have a few letters off. The heading is incorrect, the formating doesn't conform to the TANG standard at the time. But the icing on the cake is that the font does not match any known typewriter typeset, but does match perfectly with one of the supplied MS Word fonts.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

The one I saw was vintage 78.