There’s no way they can be real. They might conceivably be accurate transcripts of real memos, but they’re not photographic copies of original documents produced in 1973. It’s as though you had a colour Polaroid photograph of the Battle of Gettysburg, or a Dolby 5.1 recording of Bach humming to himself as he composed.
Yes, I read that dailykos story before I originally posted (although there’s a bit of new stuff now). And yes, it was possible to proportionally typeset documents in 1972 and 1973. There was even equipment like the IBM Executive and the Selectric Composer, that straddled the line between high-end office equipment and low-end typesetting equipment. But even if we accept the implausible notion that a Texas Air National Guard commander (or his secretary, more likely) would have one of those at his disposal and would consider the arduous manual process of centering lines on one of them a worthwhile use of time, that doesn’t explain the fact that the spacing is identical to the spacing you get out of the box with a current version of Microsoft Word. Even those (pretty uncommon) proportional-spacing typewriters that used Times Roman would not have produced identical spacing to a document created with a modern word processor.
If we were to send a memo produced with Word in 2004 back in time to 1973, it would certainly not be beyond the technology of 1973 to produce a very close copy of it. But it’s implausible that Killian just happened to produce something that looked like a laser-printed Microsoft Word document with equipment lying around the Texas ANG base. It’s not quite monkeys composing Hamlet, but it’s very close.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2004-09-13 03:42 (UTC)Yes, I read that dailykos story before I originally posted (although there’s a bit of new stuff now). And yes, it was possible to proportionally typeset documents in 1972 and 1973. There was even equipment like the IBM Executive and the Selectric Composer, that straddled the line between high-end office equipment and low-end typesetting equipment. But even if we accept the implausible notion that a Texas Air National Guard commander (or his secretary, more likely) would have one of those at his disposal and would consider the arduous manual process of centering lines on one of them a worthwhile use of time, that doesn’t explain the fact that the spacing is identical to the spacing you get out of the box with a current version of Microsoft Word. Even those (pretty uncommon) proportional-spacing typewriters that used Times Roman would not have produced identical spacing to a document created with a modern word processor.
If we were to send a memo produced with Word in 2004 back in time to 1973, it would certainly not be beyond the technology of 1973 to produce a very close copy of it. But it’s implausible that Killian just happened to produce something that looked like a laser-printed Microsoft Word document with equipment lying around the Texas ANG base. It’s not quite monkeys composing Hamlet, but it’s very close.