In article Ben Bacarisse writes: > snipped-for-privacy@hoekstra-uitgeverij.nl (Richard Bos) writes: ... > > Only > > three books did have two spaces after a full stop, and those were > > "typeset" in either troff or TeX - and the rest of the typography was > > just as dire. > > That will tell you about the books you happen to have, not about the > history of this notion. To verify that it is not a fiction, you need > to have a book in English, published in the UK or the USA, sometime > between roughly the middle of the 19th and 20th centuries.
I have been checking and found two reports from the National Physical Laboratory, dated 1980 en 1982. The major advantage is that these are written using a monospace font and not all text is right justified. They both contain only a single space after the full stop. I can not get my hands currently on older reports because this institute is in the middle of a renovation/new building, and so the library works only in part.
Other features: no space before punctuation, punctuation after a closing quotation mark if the punctuation is not part of the quote, etc..