At 11:26 AM 9/11/2004, Wirt Atmar wrote:
>Shawn writes:
>
> > No one ever taught these "tips" in any of the
> >  classes I took, and none of the typewriters I ever used, and I used a lot
> >  as I'm a very good typist, had the ability to superscript, and I was
> typing
> >  at a bunch of different offices, places that were more likely to have
> these
> >  types of features.  At the time these documents were supposedly produced,
> >  the typewriter that was available that had these features cost about
> >  $20,000, which seems unlikely that this guy would have had one
>
>That's simply not true. IBM Selectrics were common in every office -- and
>they were introduced in 1961. Please see:
>
>      http://www.fact-index.com/i/ib/ibm_selectric_typewriter.html
>
>Indeed, we had one at home. I don't remember what they cost, but we bought
>ours used from the university.

you just said "that's simply untrue" and then followed up with "I don't
remember the cost" - which is it?

>We were poor graduate students at the time, so it
>couldn't have cost much.
>
>The Selectrics had multiple type balls, so that a large variety of characters
>could be produced, including full mathematical equations such as integration,
>differentiation, and partial differentials. That's exactly what I used it
>for. Typing equations where integrals and Greek characters appeared was slow
>going, but it could produce quite nice output. Otherwise, standard equations,
>subscripting and superscripting was quite easily done.
>
>I just scanned in two pages from a document that I produced on that Selectric
>in 1976. It is a final report to Sandia National Labs on a kinematic analysis
>that James Davis and I did on the heliostats that powered a 4 MW themal solar
>power tower on Sandia's property. I left the images large so that you can see
>the typesetting in detail. They're at:
>
>      http://67.41.4.238/sandia1.jpg
>      http://67.41.4.238/sandia2.jpg
>
>As you can see, subscripting and superscripting are common in the text [As a
>note, there were smaller sized numbers on the Selectric typeball that were to
>be used for that purpose, but as you can see in the text, I apparently didn't
>always use them.]

well, that's all well and good, but as a young man living in his van and
trying to go to school and make some dough doing office work, I never saw
any of these fancy schmancy typwriters, I actually even used a lot of
manual typewriters and this was the early 80's.  On the rare occasions I
got one of these high faluting acedamia typewriters to work with, no one
was changing ball's or anything else, there was no proportionate type,
there was essentially courier and you learned to hyphenate when
appropriate.  again, I worked in offices, not at universities or military
bases, but this is my reality.


>Wirt Atmar
>
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Regards,

Shawn Gordon
President
theKompany.com
www.thekompany.com
949-713-3276

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