Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Electric typewriters

The world wide web is just amazing at times. You can find information on absolutely anything.

The other day, Dick mentioned the now famous (infamous?) memos from CBS's 60 Minutes II last Wednesday. I joined in the comments, where there was a lot of activity. Dick then posted an update the next day.

All of that is a by the way, because what really amazed me is the level of effort this guy put in to his checks on the IBM Selectric Composer and whether Lt. Col. Killian could have used such a machine to produce his memo. The conclusion is that even if Lt. Col. Killian had a state of the art machine (about $20K in today's terms) and was able to use it like a typesetter, he couldn't have produced those memos on it.

And, if you're interested in what these machines looked like - not the one mentioned in the paragraph above - here's a good start. The guy who runs this site says his politics are "anyone but Bush", but he's convinced the memos were done with MS-WORD.