As a kid, Joseph M. Newcomer was always tinkering with or building things -- not the kinds of things other kids built, but more complicated and adventuresome projects.

Pam Panchak, Post-Gazette Joseph Newcomer, who has worked in the field of computer typesetting technology since 1972, believes the documents in the recent CBS report on President Bush's National Guard duty are false. Click photo for larger image. Newsmaker Name: Joseph M. Newcomer Age: 57 Hometown: Latrobe Residence: Point Breeze Occupation: Software development and consulting Quote: "We were sure that this [falsification] would be uncovered, if not by CBS ... by the competition within a day it was so bad." Education: Bachelor's degree in mathematics from St. Vincent College, doctorate in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University Family: Wife, Bernadette Callery

One, his mother, Margaret, recalls, was designing and installing the entire water line and electrical wiring for the spring house at their Latrobe home. He did that when he was about 13.

"He was always thinking out of the box," said a brother, James.

It was this kind of thinking that led to Newcomer's skill and knowledge about computers and their printing systems. That in turn has led him into the flap started after CBS said it had received documents proving President Bush benefitted from political favors to escape commitments to the Texas Air National Guard.

He has been interviewed by newspapers and electronic news outlets across the nation, providing what he says is proof that the documents CBS cited are falsified.

Newcomer said the width of certain key letters in the documents cited by CBS proved to him that they were made on a Microsoft Word program, not on a keyboard from the early 1970s, when the documents were supposed to have been written.

"I could sit down with my Microsoft Word, type in the content of the memo, print it out and take the CBS memo, which I also printed out, hold it up to strong light and they matched perfectly," Newcomer said.

He got the CBS memo right off the network's Web site and is sure what is posted is the exact duplication of what it received.

"What they put up is what appears to me to be a scanned image of what was probably a fax of a document, and I still was convinced it was a fraud," he said.

And he adds that politics has nothing to do with the fact that he eventually posted his findings on his own Web site.

Newcomer is a Republican, but, he said, "I do not like George Bush. I do not like his politics. I do not like some of the things he's done, and I especially do not like some of the things he's promised to do.

"I did this because an otherwise respectable media outlet, specifically CBS News, has become an accessory to fraud on the American public. I will not tolerate being lied to, and in this case I had the skills to prove it.

"An opportunity like this has never happened before, and it may never happen again, but in this case I could prove it."

There is no doubting Newcomer's expertise.

"This guy is very real," said Robert Thibadeau, a professor in the Carnegie Mellon University business school's e-Commerce program. "He's sort of a prototypical classic computer scientist, and there's not a lot of those around [locally] today."

Newcomer, whose letters to the editor have been published in the Post-Gazette, has been an expert witness in legal cases. He's also taught at CMU and revised a much-used book about the Microsoft Windows program.

In that book he wrote a chapter on Microsoft font techniques, and that particular bit of knowledge is what enabled him to make his pronouncement on the CBS documents.

He said what seemed to be the proof is in the "variable pitch font," or the width of the individual characters in the type face. Nowadays, for example, the computer letter "i" is skinnier than "m's" or "w's". Back in 1972, he said, they were the same size on most commonly used typewriters.

"In modern word processing, you take the variable pitch for granted," Newcomer said.

And Newcomer has been a pioneer in computer programming for laser typesetting.

"To the best of my knowledge, either I or a fellow at Stanford are credited with writing the very first typesetting program for the XGP [Xerox graphics printer],'' Newcomer said. "We're talking here based on which of us finished within a few weeks of each other."

As his mother said, all of this grew out of his love for things mechanical and knowledge in general. Mrs. Newcomer also recalls him regularly reading the entire set of World Book Encyclopedia.

That pursuit of learning in turn segued into his choice of math as a major at St. Vincent College, where as a freshman in September 1963 he got what was then his first look at a computer. Nowadays, he said, you'd think of it as extremely slow and very big -- about the size of a desk.

"IBM brought into the college a model 1620 computer for a week's demo. I took the two-hour program course the first day, and I was hooked."

By July 1964, he had written such a promising program for his father's manufacturing company that a local computer processing firm called Anderson & Gilbert Associates offered him a job.

"They took a chance on a young kid and I won big," Newcomer said.