From: Josh

The thing about these charges that the CBS documents are forgeries is that if it's so clear that they were made on a word processing program then it shouldn't be difficult for an independent news organization to comes up with a list of experts who will say that they don't look legit.

I won't pretend to be an expert in typewriter forensices, but as the Bush Guard Service Memo Forgieries story heats up, I had to put in my own two cents.

I learned to type on my Grandmother's IBM Selectric -- a government issued one no less. The erroneous talk I've read and heard tonight was that typewriters with proportional fonts were rare, especially in government settings.

BU-SHit! The thing I hated most about those damn selectrics was that they DID have proportional spacing, indeed you could change fonts and the golf-ball "keys" had a variety of non-standard characters. Every time I made a mistake and had to type over something with white-out or erase and retype, I had to figure out just how many spaces to hit the "backspace" key. Most letters were two or three spaces, an "i" was only one while an "m" or "w" were four, capital "W" was five spaces. It drove me nuts. The first time I used a work processor (my college roomate's TRS-80 from Radio Shack) I fell in love with word-processors because they had the same nice appearance as my ageing IBM Selectric, but much more forgiving.

Also, as for them being rare in government circles, Grandma gave me her old one in '78. She was an official court reporter and personal secretary to a county judge and had a government issue typewriter at home to type up transcripts of trials. When the county upgraded her machine at the office she took her old office machine home and gave me the oldest/most-obsolete of the three for school work.

All three typewriters were proportional font IBM Selectrics issued by the government. They also had very interesting characters you don't find nowadays. I remember special keys for "one-half" and "one-forth," a "cents" [ ¢ ] key, one of these [ ‰ ] not to be confused with [ % ], this thingy: [ æ ], a [ § ] and [ ¶ ]. And honest to god I think one had that "th" and a small "st" if you hit shift-"th." You "superscripted" it by rolling the palaten down one click which was a half-space interval -- standard on the standard selectric (another endless source of agravation to me.) All done in less than two seconds without thought.

Indeed it was much easier and quicker to superscript on that thing than on the web.

OK, if you kids are done with my tin-foil hat, can I have it back please?

UPDATE: A quick look at E-Bay shows that those old font balls are still available.

Note the bottom right ball. That "Legal Courier" not only came in 10 and 12 point sizes, it had the special characters I remember.