Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

This is a non-mystery. It looks like this was done with a Selectric typewriter using two typeballs, one of them "Symbols 10", and the other for text.[1]

The reason there are two versions of "4" is because you could type something like "(4.10)" with either the regular typeball or the Symbols ball. Both have numbers, parentheses, upper case letters, and a period/decimal point. Switching typeballs takes a few seconds, so it's only done when necessary.

There was a little lever on some Selectrics which displaced the carriage horizontally by half a space.[2] So, if you really needed half spacing, it was available. But you had to hold the spring-loaded lever in place while typing, so this was rarely used. It was used for fixing typos by erasing two characters and squeezing in three. It was also possible to move the paper a half-line vertically.

This is tedious work, and there were pro typists who did it for money. This was a manual job.

All this is on Google.

[1] https://www.duxburysystems.org/downloads/library/texas/apple...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter

It looks like a Selectric to me, too. I worked for several years in the early 1980s in a university office equipped with Selectrics. Nothing in the examples shown looks as though it couldn’t have been done with a Selectric and some careful planning and execution.

When typing documents like the ones shown, the typist would count characters and plan the centering and alignment of columns in advance. I can remember marking up manuscripts with pencil before starting to type on a clean piece of paper. If you made mistakes that couldn't be corrected with whiteout or correction tape, you typed the page again.

I took some mathematics classes from Paul Halmos at UC Santa Barbara in the late 1970s. He and his wife invited a group of students to their home for dinner, and his secretary joined us as well. I remember her saying that she enjoyed the challenge of typing mathematical manuscripts even though she didn’t understand the math.

Amusingly there was a word processor called T3, which emulated the Selectric. The Alt button (if I recall correctly, since I used it for my thesis in 1993) switched to the Symbol type ball. Some combination of arrows moved the cursor up and down by a half line. There were macros for some big symbols like the integral and sum.

After a bit of practice, it was remarkably quick for doing equations. It used its own font, that looked like a mono-spaced Times Roman.

It's kind of remarkable when you think about it that old typewrites from the 1960's gave more user friendly fine control over the document layout and symbols typed than modern word processing software.

Sure LaTeX is a thing, but to call that user friendly is a nightmare.

Word but as a Selectric emulator would be pretty interesting.

That would suggest that fine control over character placement is not something users value that much.

It required a monospaced font to work, and the only thing you got was laying out characters on a 1 x 1/2 space grid. So it wasn't all that fine of control. There was no control over character size. Equations produced by LaTeX or MS Word looked a lot better.

The manuscripts we produced were not journal-ready, though they were certainly thesis-committee-ready. The technology raised the standards, and today, people care about having beautiful manuscripts. The trend was already well on the way by the time I finished grad school. I was one of the few stragglers who didn't value the extra time spent on aesthetic perfection. The students who used LaTeX seemed to take longer to finish.

The only advantage of T3 was speed. I was in a hurry to finish.

I think this is something very few people actually need to do, and you can still do it if you want to! But it makes sense that it's no longer a front and center feature.

The correction mentioned in the article ("appreciations" instead of "applications") also makes it sound very plausible that the text was typed by someone other than the author himself.

They knew how it was done, they just make it more attention grabbing so they can have views and readers. They have already done a video and an article about it. If it get more views and attention they'll probably make a book about it too.

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