In article ,
nafod40 writes:
Hey old goats...

The latest buzz from the rabid right wing attack dogs is that the newly
released memos about George Bush are forgeries. Bizaare.

The reasoning is that the memos revealed are proportional font, and use
other typesetting devices that are commonly found now on modern
computers and laser printers, but were not available in your average
Mark I Mod 0 admin department in the military.

Since I was barely out of diapers in this time frame, I thought I'd toss
it up to you grey eagles for comment. Any Admin O's out there? Air Guard
time? YNs? PNs?

http://hftp.blogspot.com/2004/09/60-...ts-forged.html

Well, at the time, they used typewriters, and Carbon Paper. That means
a monospaced font, uneven strikes, and all manner of wibbly-wobbly
letters as the thickness of the paper/carbon sandwich changed.

There certainly wasn't anything like, say, an early 1980's Word
Processor/Phototypesetter such as a Wang, DecMate, or Itek Quadritek.

I ought to know - I was there as part of the Quadritek/EON team at
Itek from '80-82, and at DEC just after. Nobody had them becasue we
were just beginning to make them. Think about it - 1973 - no
Micrcomputers. No Laser Printers. No Inkjet Printers. At that time,
Xerox machines were Really Zippy, and Fax Machines were the next best
thing to Star Trek.

Getting high quality typescript done back then was a laborious and
expensive process. Either the type was cast in metal by a Linotype
machine, operated by a specialist, or it was photoset.
Phototypesetting was a multi-step process - you exposed your type on
super-high quality photographic film, (again, a job for a specialist -
there wasn't any WYSIWYG stuff back then - kerning (spacing between
letters) and such were done manually, and was a by-guess and by-gosh
process. After the filmwas shot, it had to be kept light-tight until
it was developed. The developed film was used to deposit resist on a
blank printing plate (A plastic and Aluminum Sandwich, which contains
the full page to be run on the press) the plate is then etched away
with acid so that the characters are raised. Then, if all's gone
well, the plate is latched into an Offset Press, and you wind it up &
let it work. This wasn't cheap - we invested a _lot_ of money, time,
and effort into trying to reduce costs - stuff like recovering the
Silver from exposed film, and the metal from the used plates and acid.

Even a simple job was an all day affair.

A Proportional Font on a 1973 interoffice communication is like having
a Porsche 959 show up in a photo supposedly taken during the Battle of
the Bulge.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster