You heard it here first

Ok, perhaps not, but as I just read a Safire article that reeked of Karl Rove, I decided I had to do something. You should have heard it from, say, the New York Times or CBS first, but as far as I know they're not up on their typewriter technology. If you did, well, sorry, you heard it here also.

One can easily find, with a Google search of "proportional spacing typewriter" that--lo and behold!--the first match is the IBM Archive from 1941, listing as one of the major events in the company's history of that year was the invention of the Proportionally Spaced Typewriter. So instead of all the fonts looking like Courier, whose l's and i's take up just as much space as its W's and M's, and which therefore is the preferred method of making one's high school papers look longer. I wonder if back in the 60's, by which time proportional spacing was rather common on typewriters, at least the richer kids could make their papers look all fancy by using the typeface that looked more like most printed books rather than those monospaced typewriters. I really wonder if profs who have been working that long adjusted their page-number requirements with the new technology, or if us poor computer users really have to do more writing than our forefathers.

Also, on the superscript/subscript claim (that superscript and subscript were also impossible), that's also complete bullshit. Everyone who actually used typewriters at school and at their jobs knew that in order to make superscript and subscript, all they had to do was turn that wheel thingy on the side a little up or down, and turn it back when they were done writing the "th" after the "4" or whatever.