Bunker Mulligan "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." ~Mark Twain

September 10, 2004

Lottery

Filed under: Politics — Bunker @ 6:10 pm

curveball, today is your lucky day! Here is an open offer to “anyone who can reasonably recreate the CBS memos on equipment available in early 1972.”

Glenn Reynolds, as always, is on top of things.

2 Comments

  1. Bunker, found something for you:

    Philip D. Bouffard, a forensic document examiner in Ohio who has analyzed typewritten samples for 30 years, had expressed suspicions about the documents in an interview with the New York Times published Thursday, one in a wave of similar media reports. But Bouffard told the Globe yesterday that after further study, he now believes the documents could have been prepared on an IBM Selectric Composer typewriter available at the time.

    Bouffard, the Ohio document specialist, said that he had dismissed the Bush documents in an interview with The New York Times because the letters and formatting of the Bush memos did not match any of the 4,000 samples in his database. But Bouffard yesterday said that he had not considered one of the machines whose type is not logged in his database: the IBM Selectric Composer. Once he compared the Bush memos to Selectric Composer samples obtained from Interpol, the international police agency, Bouffard said his view shifted.

    In the Times interview, Bouffard had also questioned whether the military would have used the Composer, a large machine. But Bouffard yesterday provided a document indicating that as early as April 1969 — three years before the dates of the CBS memos — the Air Force had completed service testing for the Composer, possibly in preparation for purchasing the typewriters.

    As for the raised “th” that appears in the Bush memos — to refer, for example, to units such as the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron — Bouffard said that custom characters on the Composer’s metal typehead ball were available in the 1970s, and that 22the military could have ordered such custom balls from IBM.

    “You can’t just say that this is definitively the mark of a computer,” Bouffard said.

    Are you still sure? Yes, I bet you are…Because you want to believe.

    But guess what, this statement from you link: “As you can see, the super- and sub-scripting available to these typewriters only involved the raising or lowering of letters; it obviously couldn’t make them any smaller, since the wheel was fixed-point.” is catagorically false.

    Why do you think Word does that? Because, my dear Bunker, people who started using word processors (like me) said to themselves: “Damn, I wish I could type superscript ‘th’s on this computer, like I did back on my old typewriter.”

    Look, here is an little old woman who used to be a secratary refuting your experts opinions. I know alot about digital document manipulation and what the mere fact that you guys are basing your entire argument on a PDF is very illuminating.

    I guess I am off to Ebay to look for that Selectric Composer.

    Comment by curveball — September 11, 2004 @ 8:28 am

  2. Go for it! I like seeing entrepreneurs at work. Best of luck to you. And I mean that sincerely.

    Comment by Bunker — September 11, 2004 @ 3:57 pm

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