OFDA Cable Course: "
What are all the fields at the top of the cable? Why are all-caps used when writing a cable?
The cable is composed of two general areas: the 'header' and the 'content' areas. The header contains all the addressing information (for action and information), as well as information about who generated the cable, who authorized the cable to be sent, who was included on the cable's distribution, when and from where it was sent. Because of the relative antiquity of the cabling system, all-caps are used as a convention- the cable processing system is programmed to recognize these characters. For the same reason, cables must be written using Courier 10 font only. The State Department is working on a more updated system of cable generation and transmission, though this is still some time distant."
All caps dates back to the days of the teletype. A Teletype model 33 could just handle all caps, using a 64 character sub set of ASCII. (That was the printer used for the first PC's, back before they were PC's.) Going to lower case doubled your memory requirement. As a result, some think that God spoke in all caps. Courier and Elite were the two popular mono-spaced type faces used on all typewriters before the advent of the IBM Selectric with its golf ball font element. With all the characters on the ball, you could change type faces easily, though they still had to be monospaced. Monospacing was also key to easy OCR (by the mid-60's, we had OCR that worked with special type faces. From the excerpt, it sounds as if State used OCR on their incoming cables. Of course, between 1965 and 1999 there's been 34 years of advance in OCR, so there's no excuse to using Courier 10 these days.
Why does it matter? Tests have proved that typeface design makes a significant difference in reader comprehension and the visual appeal of the printed copy. Maybe if Dean Rusk and McNamara hadn't been forced to read Courier 10, we never would have made the commitments in Vietnam that we did.
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