Better take a big breath Dave... cause you're drowning fast!

CM

"Dave" wrote in message
...
| On Fri, 10 Sep 2004 17:02:10 GMT, felton said:
|
| "IBM announces the Electromatic Model 04 electric typewriter,
| featuring the revolutionary concept of proportional spacing. By
| assigning varied rather than uniform spacing to different sized
| characters, the Type 4 recreated the appearance of a printed page, an
| effect that was further enhanced by a typewriter ribbon innovation
| that produced clearer, sharper words on the page. The proportional
| spacing feature became a staple of the IBM Executive series
| typewriters."
|
| That was in 1941.
|
| I'm not surprised that IBM would call this proportional spacing even if
it's
| not the same as current proportional spacing. The real questions, of
course,
| are (i) whether this type was available to the guy who purportedly
produced
| the memo, (ii) whether, if so, the copy produced by this type can be
| distinguished by experts looking at a degraded copy from the proportional
| spacing of current word processors, and (iii) whether this type produced
| superscript. I don't know the answers to those questions.
|
| The thing I do find persuasive is that apparently a number of people have
| typed the same text using MS Word, and the soft line breaks of every line
| come out exactly the same as the line breaks in the questioned documents.
| Dunno whether you remember using the old electrics, but I recall that you
| had to insert line breaks as you typed. What are the chances of exactly
| reproducing those same line breaks automatically on several documents
using
| Word?
|