Comment by MyPasswordSucks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MyPasswordSucks | Hacker News Reader

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MyPasswordSucks

> Veering off topic, but this letter is in a variable width font. Were there typewriters that could do that?

Yes, and in fact one of the most popular was from IBM itself [1], released in 1944.

> The letterhead and body text aren’t aligned, so if it did go through a press it took two passes.

It was pretty standard practice to have pre-printed letterhead, hence the cachet of something being issued on "company letterhead". Take a sheet of company letterhead, pop it in the ol' Executive, and type-type-type.

> The signature is also in ink, so that’s either a third pass for color, or an actual signature, and the letter doesn’t have the notation to indicate that it was signed by the secretary, so that leads me to think that it wasn’t widely distributed.

I'm not really sure what potential significance you see in this. It was likely typed by the secretary and signed by the CEO. It's the original copy. Any copies required for the personal reference of the supervisory personnel affected would be made in the standard 1950s ways - a few carbon copies for the top executives, mimeographs further downstream if necessary.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Electric#Executive

Of course it was typed by a secretary. At a computer company I worked at starting in the mid 1980s it was not unheard of for some execs to have their admins print out emails for them and type in the handwritten responses. This was an internal-only system. No external email.

Being a touch typist was seen as kind of blue collar until everyone could afford personal computers at home..

Never learned to touch type. I can type pretty quickly but never took a course. Same with shorthand.

I know many old lawyers who still can’t type. They have admin staff (and junior solicitors) to draft correspondence for them.

They also charge enough for their services, as senior partners of big firms for it to make no sense for them to do their own typing.

As of 2010 it was not unheard of for old civil engineers to have their secretary print all email and maps, they would redline them, and the response would be typed or scanned as appropriate.

> It was pretty standard practice to have pre-printed letterhead, hence the cachet of something being issued on "company letterhead". Take a sheet of company letterhead, pop it in the ol' Executive, and type-type-type.

This was indeed standard until colour laser printers became cheap (and physically printing letters became less common), well into the 2000s.

At work, we still have several boxes of "company letterhead" in the basement, maybe 15,000 A4 sheets.

I should probably use it as scrap paper, there's no way it will ever be used for sending letters at the current rate.

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