Pre-Photoshop. I owned a copy and print store in Seattle for a number of years - started out selling computers but when the cheap clones started coming out, I moved over to the graphic arts and bought two printing presses. Had a lot of fun and made some decent money.
My Mom's side of the family owned a large paper warehouse so I grew up with commercial printing and was always fascinated by the process. I was too cheap to afford a digital plate-maker so I used a process camera for everything. Customers would bring in their camera-ready art or a photo and I would typeset their text. I would then go to my light-table and paste everything up. People raised an eyebrow but it was faster and just as accurate for me to use a razor blade to cut out the artwork and wax and paste it than to fudge with the programs available at the time. Photoshop was not available for the PC but Xerox acquired Venture Desktop Publisher and that was a great competitor - they got bought out by Corel which is an excellent piece of design software.
Anyway, here is a nice example of how printing was done - this video pre-dates any computer work and the graphic designer would make a dummy that was sent to the printer for the final separation and printing. I did my seps in house.
Hat tip to James Gurney for the link. Great trip down memory lane. One of his commenter's nails it with this:
Before you got your coffee in the morning you turned on the waxer to warm up.
The waxer was a motorized device that applied a coat of hot wax to the back of your artwork. It had just the right amount of tack to stick but still be positionable. Took about an hour to warm up so yes, open the door, turn on the lights, then the waxer and then the coffee machine.
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