Could the IBM Selectric Composer have created exact matches for MS Word documents? Greg Swann worked with the beast, and he says “no way:” The Cluetrain doesn’t run on Sixth Avenue.

I know of my own certain knowledge that the Killian memos are forgeries. I did work on the IBM Selectric Composer in the 70s, both the stand-alone model and the magnetic tape version (a Turing machine that set type—badly). I know from my own bleary-eyed effort how much time it would take to manually produce even one MS-Word style superscript. In fact, no one would have used the Selectric Composer as an office typewriter, and, even if Lt. Col. Killian had done such an insane thing, he never would have wasted the time necessary to manually produce superscripts. All of this ignores the issues of centering, kerning, etc., all of which were difficult to achieve, and required painstaking and hugely error-prone manual effort. CBS expects us to believe that Killian produced a memo ‘for the file’ that would have taken an hour, at least, to bat out on the Selectric Composer—and which he would have had to start over from scratch at the first typo.

In fact, I pulled some amazing typographic stunts out of that machine. (For example, typing a line in Univers Bold, then cranking the lead by one point (1/72nd inch) and the escapement by one-half point (1/144th inch), then retyping the same line to create a faux Kabel Black look.) Cheap art done with panache. But not quickly, and not on a whim. Like everyone else in the 70s, I wrote copy on a plain vanilla IBM Selectric Typewriter. Rock solid, mono-spaced, six lines to the vertical inch—nothing like the Killian memos released by CBS.

I haven’t even bothered to speak up on this aspect of this obvious fraud. Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs has proved beyond all doubt that the Killian memos are forged. Stupid stunts like the one pulled over the weekend by Edward Mendelson at PC Magazine prove nothing. In fact, not even an experienced Selectric Composer operator could have produced those memos, nor a Linotype compositor, nor any other typographer using 70s-epoch equipment. ‘Set to match’ is one of the hardest jobs in fine-art typography, and there was no equipment available then that could do what Charles Johnson has done effortlessly and repeatedly with MS-Word straight out of the box.

This is not subject to debate by rational men. The Killian memos are forgeries.