# Posted 10:16 AM by Patrick Belton
IT WAS BAD ENOUGH WHEN this election was about 1970s war records. When it became about 1970s typewriters, I decided to go write my dissertation.
Incidentally, from the steady stream of email I've been getting since my one foray into the subject this morning, the strongest argument seems to me to be the fact that Times New Roman didn't appear on Selectric typewriters, being owned (the emails tell me) by Monotype. The second strongest argument is, having served briefly in a national security branch of government, it seems from my own experience highly unlikely that anyone other than possibly a young Marine would devote the thirty seconds to changing Selectric balls and typing 'th' after ordinal numbers in superscripts. (Our Marine embassy guards, at three in the morning, would begin scrubbing things at random, occasionally to include my computer. One even tried to teach me better ways to do push-ups, around 4 am.)
# Posted 6:24 AM by Patrick Belton
GARY FARBER TAKES apart a few silly media myths appearing in the WaPo, ABC, and elsewhere this morning about typewriters in the Seventies. He, you see, was there:
So now we hear that the Bush
documents may be forgeries. Are they? I have no idea. But I do know some things that are nonsense when I see them.... 'The experts also raised questions about the military's typewriter technology three decades ago. Collins said word processors that could produce proportional-sized fonts cost upwards of $20,000 at the time.' 'I'm not real sure that you would have that kind of sophistication in the office of a flight inspector in the United States government,' Showker said. 'The only thing it could be, possibly, is an IBM golf ball typewriter, which came out around the early to middle 1970s,' Haley said. 'Those did have proportional fonts on them. But they weren't widely used.'
Instead of talking to 'experts,' the Post and ABC might have done a bit of googling instead:
The IBM Executive uses a unique system of letter spacing... instead of every character taking exactly the same space on the writing line, as on standard typewriters, thin letters get narrower space, wide letters get the wider space needed. So, each word, each line, is more attractive, and more legible, and the overall appearance is outstanding. (from IBM Executive advertisement, 1953)
As Farber notes, 'They in no way cost "$20,000" or even $2000. They sold new for a few hundred dollars.'
More poor research appears in the bit about superscripts: ABC's expert Haley says 'There weren't any typewriters that did that.... That looks like it might be a function of something like Microsoft Word, which does that automatically.' Or you could listen to a blogger who was there, who says 'it might have been done by a Selectric, which most certainly did superscripts and subscripts. All you had to do is switch golfballs. Doesn't anyone remember actually using these things?'
Well, OxBlog doesn't. But we're glad that there are people in the blogosphere who do, since the mainstream media's typewriter experts apparently don't, either.
UPDATE: A counterpoint, also from the blogosphere. Personally, I should note that like Josh, I believe rather strongly that elections should be fought on ideas, instead of the Vietnam war records of either candidate, which I consider an irrelevance and a distraction. However, as long as we're trafficking in irrelevances, I'm delighted that the blogosphere is capable of doing so at a factual level above what we've seen from the more established forms of journalism.
http://oxblog.blogspot.com/2004_09_05_oxblog_archive.html#109481251096105902
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