Absolute dumbest forgery claim: The centering of the squadron address

[Karmadillo]

OK it's probably not the dumbest (a multiple tie for first). And given the millions of threads we've been starting today, this is probably a dupe, but I couldn't help but laugh at David Gregory's (GE TV) report that one suspicious feature of one document was that the address of the fighter squadron was centered. According to experts, Gregory intoned, this would be a difficult feat for a typist to perform.

Difficult? Millions of typewriter users would disagree. If the left margin is 10 and the right margin is 80, you simply go to the middle (80+10)/2, and start backspacing one space for every two letters in the text being centered. Elementary and high school kids used to do it all the time. That the media needs to resort to such transparent crap to protect Bush shows just how desperate the right wing and their media puppets are feeling regarding the AWOL story (and waiting for the next shoe to drop--snort, snort, snort).

[CatWoman]

1. centering is one of the first things you learn on a manual typewriter

after you master "asdf jkl;"

:D

[Ivote]

6. qwerty

couldn't resist

[CatWoman]

11. the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

:D

[City Lights]

14. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country!

Like, pronto. Stand up and do your frickin' jobs fer chrissakes.

[Retrograde]

37. pack my boxes with five dozen liquor jugs

a much better pangram* for Fridays - esp. today!

The people trying to pick holes in these docs may have been born yesterday, but I'm old enough to remember the days of manual typewriters - I still have one. Centering titles was a real pain, since it required counting, as was typing chemical formulae with all those subscripts. But we all got by somehow, largely with the help of that now-obsolete group of employees known as "typists", who specialized in doing this even for lowly technical workers (no one's brought this up yet: most people did not do their own typing in The Olden Days - see any movie made in the 1950s with an office scene to see a typing pool).

Do I need to explain why the "backspace" key on my computer keyboard is called that? Or why "Enter" was called "Return" on very early models, and the end-of-line is sometimes called a carriage return?


lm

*pangram: sentence containing all 26 letters of the alphabet. Note nostalgic use of footnote :-)

[Nite Owl]

2. Just wait until next week

when the Kitty Kelly book comes out they will be spinning so fast Ivan will look like a quiet summer rainfall.

[spooky3]

7. LOL, fabulous metaphor!!!!

[gollygee]

3. ROFL how old is the person who reported that? (m)

It seems like anyone over about 25 would know how to center something on a typewriter. Geeze I've done it thousands of times. Thousands. ROFL

[Lefta Dissenter]

4. you have GOT to be kidding

centering is just about the first thing we learned in typing class!

D'OH!

[spooky3]

5. That does it. Everyone too young to have to take typing in HS

on IBM Selectrics and similar typewriters should be prevented from making any on-air statements about what was or was not done/available at the time.

Next they're going to be telling us that there was no such thing as Wite-Out, red ribbons, or typewriter erasers.

[Dookus]

8. lol

I took typing in High School, on a real old-fashioned manual typewriter.

We learned centering immediately. In fact, it's sort of odd that now that it's so damned easy to center, few people bother to do it. But it was the style at the time (said a la Grandpa Simpson).

[LandOLincoln]

9. Absolutely right. I saw that claim last night and

spewed soda all over my keyboard, I laughed so hard.

[wishlist]

10. I just mentioned (on another thread) this laughable claim!

I learned in typing class in 7th grade over 30 years ago how to center an address by manual typewriter just like the address shown on the memo! It doesn't require a computer to do that. Just because things are automatically done now on a computer doesn't mean they weren't done by hand quite well also.

[nadinbrzezinski]

12. Ok, ok this is funny

but HOW MANY PEOPLE UNDER THIRTY know how to center a piece of paper on the type writer?

Hell I had half forgotten it myself....

Flashbacks to long nights, cups of coffee and the tipper tapper of my typewriter while getting papers ready in High School. Did not start using a computer until College

[Philostopher]

13. For all they know,

as degreded as the PDF version of the document is, it may have been letterhead stationery. If they can't discredit the message, they have to try to kill the messenger.

[Longhorn]

15. Not to disagree

but I think they were saying it would be difficult to manually center when using proportional type, where an "i", for example, doesn't take up as much space as a "w."

Seems to me in that case, you would add up the single, double, and possibly triple values of each letter, divide by two, then backspace that many from the center of the page. Anyone ever center proportional type?

[OilemFirchen]

18. That's exactly how you'd do it.

Total up the values of all the characters, divide in half, then incrementally backspace.

Perhaps, BTW, that explains why muckity-mucks didn't do their own typing back then, forcing it on secretaries. Required too much brainpower!

[Longhorn]

21. So even that doesn't take a rocket scientist, huh?

I must have done some typing with proportional fonts myself because that sounds darn familiar. Thanks for the corroboration!

[ochazuke]

22. No, no, no, no, NOE!

EYE

BEE

EMM

SELL

ECK

TRICK

It was a miraculous machine. It was introduced about ten years before the Killian documents were typed, and it was common around offices all around the country.

My god, was it really that long ago?

[Longhorn]

29. I know what a Selectric is. My natural father worked for IBM

and had a paperweight with the Selectric typing ball encased in plexiglass before he and my mother divorced in 1964.

But even with a Selectric, you had to manually center text, and that's what we're talking about.

[ochazuke]

32. Refering to the instruction manual

the Selectric Composer can justify text.

But you say that it can't center? That has to be done manually?

[OilemFirchen]

36. I think the presumption

is that the Composers were too pricy for gummint use at the time. So, references to "Selectrics" would include the I and II.

Me, I'm not so sure they weren't used. And they were not only capable of proportional fonts, they could even justify text. All without electronics.

I think these memos were typed on an Executive, but I wouldn't dismiss the possibility of a Composer. They weren't, however, typed on a standard Selectric.

[ochazuke]

42. Bottom line

For everyone except possibly a real expert on impact typography of the 1960s, there is nothing in the Killian memos to raise supspicion of forgery.

And for the experts, they would probably want to see the originals before rendering an opinon. Then, they probably still wouldn't be looking at the typeface, centering and etc., but rather if the paper seemed to have aged and if the characters were rendered by physical impact (a typewriter).

[yardwork]

55. That's right.

Thank you for raising some of the questions a real expert would ask when examining authenticity.

All these so-called news agencies should be ashamed of themselves. I mean that - ashamed.

I just sent CNN an email telling them all to go back to journalism school.

[mistertrickster]

61. Damn right--and USA Today on line has the story on page one

"Papers look like fakes." http://usatoday.com/

This after all the de-bunking--what WHORES they are.

[ochazuke]

64. Thank YOU

for putting "counterpressure" on the mainstream media.

[Longhorn]

45. Here's what I remember about typing.

Any typewriter can justify text -- but it's the operator who actually does the justifying. The only way the machine can do it is if the text is entered into memory and it prints the line after it has done the calculations. Otherwise, how does the machine "know" what is being typed in order to make the spacing adjustments? We have such typewriters now and the memory typewriters of the 70's could do it, too -- they were actually primitive (by today's standards) word processors.

I used to type up a newsletter for a political news organization at the Texas state capitol. The writer would actually type a rough draft and count the characters in each line and put a total at the end of the number of spaces that needed to be inserted in order for the line to be fully justified. Then I would evenly space the words out when I typed it. For non-proportional text, each character and space has a value of "1" but for proportional text, the characters have numeric values depending on how wide they are: a "1" for and i, j, l, for example, a "2" for most other letters and a "3" for m, w, and some caps, maybe? (I don't remember for sure -- maybe there were only two values, "1" and "2" -- it's been almost 30 years!)

Anyway, as fascinating as all this is ;), a heading could clearly have been centered back in the day, with or without a Selectric or proportional text.

P.S. Typing class is over! :D

[ochazuke]

46. Let's get back to beating bush like a drum. <eom>

[Hepburn]

70. Yep, a bit more difficult...

...but an IBM Selectric had a little chart that gave the values of the letters. I seem to recall, for example, that a cap "M" was 3. It took a second to get the hang of it, but it was not that hard to do once you got familiar with the values - all you had to do was use the value of the letter when you added up the letters and spaces, divide by 2, and backspace from center using that number. It worked for me.

[OilemFirchen]

16. The claim...

... though I doubt Gregory understood it or got it right, is that only a modern word processing program could exactly center odd numbered lines.

Which is bullshit. As I mentioned on another thread, I believe that the Selectrics could do half spaces (and backspaces). And the Executive could do 1/8th spaces.

So, just in case a certain poster wanted to infuse the latest freeker meme...

BEAT YA TO IT!

[yardwork]

57. I used a Selectric, and it had half-spaces

It also had a special key for the superscript 'th' and there were plenty of balls available with different type faces and sizes. They popped in and out very easily.

What's really shocking to me is that CNN and NBC and Faux News actually 'reported' all this nonsense! It wasn't too long ago that crank letters to the editor got thrown in the trash. Now the crank letters make the headline news!

[WoodrowFan]

17. BOL

I haven't used a typewriter in YEARS but I still remember how to do that! They covered that in High School typing on about day 1.

[ochazuke]

19. Warning: Sarcastic Message

It was impossible to have created that message in the early 1970s. In that time period, a shallow inland sea covered what is now Texas, therefore, it would have been impossible to create any sort of document. The only humans to inhabit what is now The 43rd Reich were using paint made from plants and stone chisels to make messages.

A few years later, the people spreading these forgery rumors were born. They used a miraculous technology invented by nerds who sprang up from the western ocean along the San Andreas fault to spread their waspocentric word view throughout the blogosphere.

And now you behold the wonderous world around you.

[bklyncowgirl]

20. Showing my age here but yes, centering on a typewriter is possible

Take it from a graduate of Katherine Gibbs school.

Actually I hated doing it and my first chance to work with a word processing program was a "eureka" moment but anyone who relies on that as proof that these documents are fake is either an idiot or a liar--or both.

Apparently the Colonel had a pretty good secretary.

[A_Possum]

23. Some people say...

That you can do long division without a calculator.

I think it's just more left-wing spin myself.

[karlrschneider]

24. I did read the thread but have to put in another tuppence...I learned to

type in the 8th grade WAY BACK in 1955 (on an Underwood manual with no letters on the keys)...and which I still consider one of the most valuable courses I ever took from K to College...and we were shown how to do it...as I did for many years. But I usually "cheated" a little,
rather than do the "calculation", I'd just move the carriage to what "looked like" the middle (I could eyeball it within 1 or 2 chars) then
backspace half the number in whatever needed to be centered. :D

[Waverley_Hills_Hiker]

25. Whats odd is that, on one memo, is that was typed to begin with.

The one that is addressed to Lt Bush.

This looks like official correspodence, which is almost always on letterhead...with the squadron address preprinted on the stationary.

The fact that someone went through the effort to typwrite a letterhead to mimic preprinted stationary is pretty wierd.

Most Memo to Files or Memo to Records are more informal and wouldnt have the sqaudron letterhead typed on them.

So, yeah, I think these docs are suspicious.

[jmowreader]

72. Not unusual at all for the military

In the really old days, when you were typing a memo:

Informal memos for internal use went on a Disposition Form, or DF. You had a place to put your office symbol, a place for the title of the memo, and a place for the text.

Anything that was going out electrically needed to be on DD Form 173, which the OCR scanners in the comms center needed to properly see the text that was about to go out. (In the really old days, if you wanted to send what would now be sent by e-mail, you had to have commander's approval because the government paid by the character.)

Memos that were more-formal used typed letterhead. You got a blank sheet of paper, typed this:

DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY
Headquarters, Headquarters and Operations Company, 311th Military Intelligence Battalion (CEWI)
101st Airborne Division (Air Assault)
Fort Campbell, KY 42223

This could only be used for correspondence within the unit.

For memos that were going outside the battalion, you used printed letterhead. If you wanted some you had to go to the Personnel Administration Center or the Battalion Operations Office because no one else had any. Colonel McGuinness's secretary didn't even have any.

Now they use the Informal Memorandum, which is formatted just like a formal memorandum except you didn't need to spend 45 seconds typing the letterhead.

[buycitgo]

26. really, and some people were trumpeting what a hardass that

jagoff has been lately

he's been doing nothing but Bush puffpieces lately

he's been semi-tough at some press conferences in the past...sure

but he's been the king of suck lately; almost as bad as John King

[jfalchion]

27. But...

Manually centering with absolute accuracy on a typewriter with proportional font is a real PIA. Centering with uniform width characters is easy.


:kick:

[0rganism]

56. Something as common as the squadron heading was probably written down

Joanne Secretary is sick of doing the same damn letterhead calculation every time. She's even more tired of answering questions from newbs about how to center text on the Executive. So she writes it down, to ease her workload and that of anyone else who needs to know how to do it.

Or she types it once, runs it through the mimeograph, and puts a hundred copies in a bin.

Or the whole thing is a forgery and CBS doesn't do fact checking anymore.

What is more likely?

[Warpy]

28. People under 30 have never had to contend with this stuff

I'm sure I'm not alone among the old relics on this board in dumping MS Word because it gets in the way of all the stuff we were taught to do manually and/or in our heads when we were learning how to touch type on old manual machines. Automatic composing will screw up all the stuff we've already composed before we start typing it out. In fact, the only thing I find useful at all is word wrap, and that's because this box doesn't ding when I get near a margin.

Anybody who had a typing job of any description prior to about 1980 knows those documents are genuine. We used the machines that produced them. The freepers out there trying to debunk them don't have the benefit of this experience, and think the world went from 1930s vintage Underwoods into word processing with no stops in between.

[A_Possum]

30. Wasn't there a centering key on the selectrics?

Seems like I recall that you could actually have the machine center for you. You'd somehow tell it you wanted a line centered (I don't recall how) and then you'd type the line, and the machine would type it for you, automatically centered.

I only did some typing in a summer job when I was in HS at this time in the early 70's, but I vaguely remember this.

I had a cousin who was a superb typist, and I'm sure she could center anything on any machine.

[jfalchion]

34. reply

What you suggest would imply a memory chip of some kind. The IBM Selectrics/Executives I recall were purely mechanical. They weighed at least 25 #.

[A_Possum]

35. Well...

not sure it would, but maybe i'm thinking of one that i used in the mid-eighties.

[jfalchion]

40. another reply

I wrote my dissertation on one in 1973. Damned if I can remember the agony of the details. Some protective brain circuit (GFI?) kicks in.

[yardwork]

59. I know exactly what you mean! IBM had one - the name is on another thread

They were like primitive word processors. They had limited memory that allowed lines or paragraphs to be held in memory, and then printed on the page in the format you chose.

They were available in the early 1980s when I was a secretary.

I think that these documents were typed on an IBM Selectric or another brand of electronic typewriters, which were in common use in offices by the late 1960s. Of course I can't be certain that they are real. We don't have access to the originals, and even if I did, I'm not an expert on forgeries.

I can say that based on my personal experience as a typist in college and a secretary in the early 1980s, these documents could easily have been produced on machines of 1960s technology or even earlier. In fact, these documents are not even particularly polished. Any competent typist - even a hunt and pecker - could have typed these documents in the early 1970s, no problem at all.

[OilemFirchen]

63. The (Selectric) Composer was introduced in 1966

It could do amazing things without any electronics, by using a manual buffer.

Here's a brochure:

http://ibmcomposer.org/SelComposer/brochure.htm

The site also includes an Operator's Manual.

I find it hard to believe that six years after its introduction, the U.S. Military wouldn't have been using them. Thus, having staked my claim on the Executive, I hereby officially change my mind. 'Twas a Composer for sure.

BTW, read how to center in the manual. Pretty nifty process, using a centering tab and the buffer.

[crickets]

38. Center key

I was wondering the same thing. I can't recall, though I know my newer typwriter does have one.

[Longhorn]

31. Gotta go with the flow, I guess.

What gets me is when I make a typo and Word has self-corrected it a split second before I hit backspace to catch it myself! I'm as fast at correcting typos as I am at typing, which is pretty darn fast! :D

[yardwork]

62. I'm not asking anyone to believe that they are real vs. forgeries

I have no idea whether they are real or not.

What I do know is that the reasons given so far for them being fakes are stupid and wrong.

Very real questions exist about Bush's service, such as:

Why didn't he show up for a required physical?

If he had permission to skip the physical, where is his documentation of this permission?

Why would the National Guard give a pilot permission to skip a required physical and scrub the pilot after they had invested all that time and money in training him while we are war?

Where was Bush in the summer of 1972 and for several months in early 1973?

Why didn't Bush get in trouble for being absent during those months?

Other members of the National Guard were court-martialed and sent to Vietnam when they went AWOL. What was Bush's excuse? Where are the documents?

Why won't Bush release his military records? Kerry has released his.

[ochazuke]

44. So true

What has been exposed is not the forgery of some documents, but the youthful arrogance of the next generation of knee-jerk fascisto-cons.

[Neshanic]

33. I sucked at typing, and I could center that on a stone-age machine

What a pile of crap. That was easy to do.

But us oldsters with the young uns'and their rock and roll could teach them to center it on a manual.

[Cleopatra2a]

41. stationary

You didn't even have to type in the address. In my old Air Force days we had boxes and boxes letterhead stationary. In my current Air Force days, we just use a MSWord template.

[Elidor]

39. This is the type of BULLSHIT that passes for reporting!

Fucking incredible! Where do they find these idiots? That they make more than minimum wage is an affront to honest shit-shovelers everywhere! If the DC press corps could suck as hard as it can blow, the Potomac would flow backward!

Turn them off. Unsubscribe to the cable. No matter what channel you watch, 99% of them are owned by the same 5 recklessly irresponsible corporate behemoths. Turn them off and quit giving them money.

[yardwork]

60. Please write to them and tell them that!

There are links on other threads.

I just wrote to CNN and NBC and told them that they should hang their heads in shame.

[henslee]

43. dumbest forgery claim... the decaf latte coffe stain. They didn't have

decaf or lattes until 1982!!!!

[William Seger]

47. Well, I'm sure I won't have any friends left here...

... (especially since I took the unpopular side of a few conspiracy theory arguments when I first started posting here), but here goes:

Actually, the centering was the thing that finally convinced me that the documents are a hoax. Yeah, I took typing in High School in the early 60s, too, and yes I understand how you just backspace from the center, half the number of characters in each line. With a monospaced typewriter, the lines all come out centered (relative to each other at least), unless one line has an even number of characters and another has an odd number; then they don't.

But even that goes out the window with proportional spacing: If the characters are different widths, then it's extremely unlikely that the first half of the characters in one line will be the same width as the last half of that line. You can't really center a proportionally spaced line accurately unless you know the total width.

What the "document debunkers" are saying is that the centering on the letterhead is just TOO good, and I'm afraid they're right. Even worse, the centering matches what Microsoft Word does in a way that just doesn't seem very probable by coincidence. And, it's rather clear that the centering wasn't done by just backspacing half the number of characters.

I'm sure I'm going to get flak for this, but I'm not giving the "debunkers" any fresh ammo here -- they've already found this one, and it's not going to just disappear. Like everyone else here, I'm still hoping that someone will come along and prove that the documents could have come from a 70s typewriter, but in the meantime, I think we need to understand that there really is a lot of convincing evidence that these documents are a crude hoax. I'd really like to think our side can at least take the position that intellectual honesty is the best policy, in the long run. (Yeah, I know that they sure as hell don't, e.g. everything from the invasion of Iraq to the SBVT, but one thing I certainly don't want is to be anything like them.)

So, here is my composite of the letterhead from the May 4 memo and the same lines produced by Microsoft word using 12-point Times New Roman. (I've added some extra space between the lines, so the Word lines would fit in between, and I resized the Word lines up and down several times -- both larger and smaller -- to simulate at least some of the "noise" that might be introduced by printing, scanning, and copying.) The red line is centered on the top line of the memo, and the red lines on the ends of each of the other lines are the same distance from the center line. As you can see, the 2nd and 3rd lines appear to be very slightly off-center toward the left side, but unfortunately, they're that way in Word, too.

[A_Possum]

48. What's obvious to me

Is that the memo letters not lined up horizontally. Whereas they are perfectly lined up in your reproduction using word. Try drawing some of your nice red lines =underneath= the letters instead of down the center. And the 111 doesn't even vaguely look like what you have. In fact, it appears that to get your letters to match in size, you've created a lot of distortion in the memo letters by enlarging them until they have odd shapes caused by pixel distortions. But the one thing that pixel distortions wouldn't do is make the "erceptor" in Interceptor float gabove the horizontal base of the line. It doesn't do that in your repro.

[William Seger]

50. Yes, I understand that...

... but what the debunkers are going to say is that the forger might have noticed that the lines looked way too straight in his initial attempt, then easily faked that (e.g by editing a scan) to make it look more like a typewriter.

Let me repeat, I'm really hoping that someone will be able to duplicate those documents on a typewriter. And I'm certainly not saying that this "proves" the documents are a hoax; I'm saying that this (and several other valid points) are very hard to explain away as coincidence, and it convinced me that the case the "debunkers" are making is much stronger than some people here want to give it credit for. I just don't want to go down with this rowboat.

[jab105]

51. I've stayed mostly out of this...

but, if someone was to go to the trouble of making the letters uneven...then why in the world wouldnt they also go on ebay, and toss out $100 for a typewriter from that era (heck, my dad still has one)...anyone would know that a computer would be so easy to tell as fake...it just makes no sense to not use a typewriter, even if they were forgeries...

[William Seger]

52. Damn good question...

... but it's possible that they were simply lazy and not very bright. But frankly, I'm starting to lean toward the "planted" theories.

[A_Possum]

58. mmmmm

well, I dunno what you did to get them to line up vertically, and I haven't really participated in the whole discussion on this level. So this is just a sort of critique of your critique. :-)

The letters on the memo not only float, they're distorted from top to bottom (compare the o's, for instance), which is the plane of distortion on a typewriter because the keys are hitting a surface that is curved in that plane. There is no curve from left to right, because the keys are hitting a roller, not a globe. Therefore distortion would be less from left to right, it seems to me, although the mechanical motion of the print-head would presumably introduce some small variability.

It seems to me that the fact that the letters float horizontally but still line up pretty well vertically can equally be considered evidence that they are NOT faked.

BTW, you didn't put red lines where the comparison doesn't actually line up, for instance, at the end of "squadron," at the "u" and the comma in "Houston," at the second "t" in "interceptor" And in several cases where you do put the red lines, they don't actually line up all that perfectly--there is more bleed in the memo because of distortion, but the line itself tends to fool the eye into "seeing" that the letters are in the same vertical line.

I think your comparison would be more useful if you actually superimposed the two, maybe in different colors so that you could see where they don't match.

[William Seger]

65. The character distortions are caused by Xerox copying

Xerox machines are analog, not digital, and regardless of what the original typeface was, it's clear that there has been a lot of distortion of the kind that Xerox machines cause. (Otherwise, the round characters wouldn't be so far out of round.) I'm not pretending to be an expert on all the issues here, but I think that kind of distortion could cause characters to shift around a bit.

(On edit: Another thing to consider is that my Word text is actually a screen capture, with the "view" mode set to "print" and the zoom set to 300%. But the screen driver might not be -- in fact, can't be -- using the exact same spacing that a printer driver would, because it has lower resolution to work with.)

Don't get me wrong; the things you are talking about are exactly the same things that I thought, and up until this evening, they made the Word theory at least questionable. If it weren't for those issues, I think it would be a slam-dunk (and I'm not still not 100% convinced that it is).

But as I said, it was the centering thing that finally convinced me that there is a very strong argument in favor of a Word document theory. Think about it: On any kind of typewriter, how could you possibly position the first character so that a proportionally spaced line would come out so well centered? I mean, even if you did know exactly how wide the line was going to turn out to be -- say, if you typed it on another piece of paper first -- so you knew exactly where it ought to start, how would you force a typewriter to start precisely there? How wide are the forward spaces and backspaces on a typewriter that does proportional characters? Whatever they are, they are "quantized." What do you do if you need to move only half or three-quarters of that space? So the problem is, to get the near-perfect centering that the memo shows, you not only need to know precisely how wide the line will turn out to be, but you also need some kind of "micro" positioning to actually start there.

[A_Possum]

69. If the distortion were caused by copying

then there would be equal distortion in 4 directions. The greatest distortion by far is up and down (look at the bottoms of the 1's) except for some spaces that are too small from left to right, like what makes "squadron" shorter in the memo.

I don't get your centering issue at all. You aren't even looking at the original document. How can you talk about "perfect" micro-centering when you are several steps away from the original peice of paper?

And the typewriter in question DID in fact move proportional spaces, of course. We're all so dependent on computers that we forget that people didn't always do it this way. Listen, do you think when an electric typewriter with proportional spacing was introduced, it didn't include a way to perfectly center a line??? People centered lines all the time on proportional typewriters. Do you think all those hot-shot secretaries sent out cock-eyed headers in the 70's? This is how I vaguely recall doing it--the typewriter itself centers, and then you hold down something and input the letters mechanically from the middle letter, and the typewriter moves itself backwards for you (proportionally, because you are telling it each letter), so you start at the point where the line would begin.

The more I've thought about this, the more I've remembered about the typing I did back in the '70's. I actually did some summer typing for a government agency, and it was on a big ol' IBM, though I don't know what exact model.

Have you actually overlaid the text? Have you reproduced the same thing on all the memos?

There's new info from one of the experts who at first thought they were fake. When he compared the memos to documents written at the time with IBM's, he's changed his mind.

[William Seger]

71. I'm having second thoughts about the centering...

... because of OilemFirchen post (below) about character "weights." If the IBM Executive had eight specific widths that it used -- rather than arbitrary widths -- and a way to move one "quantum" space at a time, then you could add up all the weights in a line and then divide that number by 2. I found one forum on the Web where a former secretary, talking about the "good ol' days," implies that that is correct. Although she was talking about the difficulties in backspacing on the Executive to make a correction, that's really the same problem as accurate centering. There would still be a small relative off-centering if one line had an odd number of weights and another had an even number, but I don't think the three-line sample in the memo letterhead answers that, especially if Word really uses a similar method of centering.

This morning, I've been looking at the debunker claim that the documents show "kerning," which would be damning if true. Kerning means that the characters aren't just proportionally spaced according to their own width, but also relative to adjacent characters, to make the apparent space between adjacent characters more even. But that claim about the documents is bogus for two reasons: first, the examples people are citing don't really prove any kerning (because the apparent overlapping of character spacing could be simply because of "bleeding" of the characters); and second, the lack of kerning wouldn't prove anything, either, because MS-Word does not kern Times New Roman typeface (each character occupies a specific width regardless of adjacent characters, just like on a proportional typewriter).

So, I'm back on the fence, and I'm still hoping someone will come along with a reproduction of the memos produced on a typewriter. Although I'm much less certain now about the claims being made, they are still "convincing enough" to a lot of people that the only way to put an end to this is to conclusively prove that a typewriter from that era could produce a similar document.

[OilemFirchen]

73. I'm going back and forth

Not on the documents' authenticity, but, rather, on the equipemnt used. Coulda been a Composer, though I don't know whether it had the dual-pitch superscripting of the Selectric II (which would have made the th a piece of cake), or the Executive.

The Composer made centering simple, because it had a typeahead buffer. It used a centering device at the platen - you moved the platen to the center, then "dead-typed" the line to be centered, after which the buffer was emptied, first by moving to one half of the total charachter weight, then printing out the buffer. The Executive required manually counting the characters, but I suppose a good secretary would be able to do so quickly. Especially if he or she had typed that centered line before. And, of course, in this case it would have been routine.

Y'know, it's also possible that it wasn't done with an IBM machine at all. Coulda been a Varityper or some other machine - an Olivetti, whatever. The point is that the technology clearly existed at the time, probably in more ways than we can imagine.

[Karmadillo]

66. Yikes. Posted in wrong place.

n/t

[mbali]

49. I learned that centering technique in my YWCA typing class when I was 10 -

and put it to good use for years until computers came into being.

[renotyme]

53. centering proportional text is not a matter of counting characters

because the text is not a fixed length based on the number of characters, but differs depending on the specific characters.

but i dont mean to interrupt the revery! carry on!

[OilemFirchen]

54. No. It's a matter of counting character weight.

Proportional fonts aren't kerned, they're simply fixed characters of differing sizes. IIRC, the Executive characters were weighted from 1 to 8. So you added up the character weights, divided by two, and backspaced the appropriate distance.

But I don't mean to interrupt your fantasy. Carry on!

[Karmadillo]

67. Thanks everyone for the comments on this thread. Maybe

the claim isn't the absolute dumbest, since proportional type would appear to make centering a little more difficult than I implied (the Gregory report didn't mention the issue of proportionality), but it certainly sounds like something most typists with access to proportional type could pull off. As usual, the discussion here is much more enlightening than the information fed to us by the media.

[against all enemies]

68. 1968 -Personal Typing Class- Even I could center the letter head.

Hit back space once for every two letters. David Gregory is the best the media has to offer? we're fucked.