re: #301 Lord of the Pies

I was a FReeper at the time and I do remember Buckhead starting the conversation, but then you picked up the ball and ran with it.

Also, Wonkette is claiming there so too were typewriters that could do superscript and kerning and italics in the 1970’s!!!11!!! well yeah, but they cost like $20,000 and were mini typesetting machines and required specialized training to operate. They were not something that somebody at a low-level National Guard jrrb would have for playing around on and writing personal memos to self.

That’s all true, but more than that — even if you tried to produce a document with one of these hypothetical typesetting typewriters that wouldn’t have been found anywhere near a Texas Air National Guard base, there’s STILL no way you could produce something that looks like the CBS documents. The fonts these high-end machines used were not the same fonts we use today, and anyone trying to duplicate the CBS docs with one of them would immediately discover that the spacing, kerning, leading, line breaks, tab stops, etc. were not even close.

And I duplicated one of the docs exactly, in just a few minutes with the default settings of Microsoft Word.

Microsoft Word has had a few revisions since then, and you probably couldn’t reproduce that doc the same way with the latest version. That’s how distinctive the “font fingerprint” is.