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. 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.]

Wirt Atmar

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