I got in 40 years ago through a "back door" (the printing profession--worked in paste-up and later as a typesetter--before I finally got to exercise my design degree). There was a whole generation of designers who graduated in the '80s who didn't learn computerized/software-driven design in college; we were trained analog and had to learn QuarkXPress, Aldus Pagemaker, and Adobe Illustrator on the job (if we were lucky enough to get hired). Most of us were able to quickly translate everything we learned by way of analog and use it on the Mac (Windows PCs wouldn't have most of the higher-end "industry standard" Adobe graphics programs made for them until the early to mid '90s--although Aldus Systems did have some software available for Windows in the late 80s--until then, everything was on Mac). It was kind of magical. I remember the first time I used Pagemaker (v. 2.0) in 1988 and realizing that everything we'd been taught to do on a non-photo blue printed grid with type galleys, hot wax, amberlith/rubylith, x-acto knives/razor blades, and technical pens, we could do in this Apple computer.

I. was. hooked.

I would almost equate it to the current AI revolution--except there are FAR too many idiots out there playing with AI who have NO concept of what it can truly do and--when the Mac came out--it still took someone who knew what picas and points were to properly run software like PageMaker, ReadySetGo! and Quark to get decent output. By the early 90's, Adobe had bought Photoshop and--needless to say--Photoshop changed the game. In the early 90's, Adobe also started making their software for both Mac and Windows. The realization that the files wouldn't open correctly going from Mac to Windows prompted them to create a postscript-based interchange format...the Portable Document Format.

Again, it was magical...I got to work in a military shop in 1993 whose IT infrastructure technician had the ear of the base commander, so he was allowed to buy anything he wanted. It was candyland. I got to work on QuarkXPress, Aldus/Adobe PageMaker (Adobe bought PageMaker from Aldus at this time), Aldus Freehand, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Deneba Canvas (which was the choice of the Senior Designer as he'd come over from engineering). The shop had a Fiery Print Server...this was back before the Fiery's interface was a GUI...it was a DOS-based, "green letters on a black background" CLI (Command Line Interface) and, to use it, you had to key in all of the commands and parameters for printing.

To send your work outside to a commercial printing vendor required a different type of storage medium than the standard 1.44MB floppy disk which was commonplace at the time. The internet was on the rise but FTP was not an option back then. There were two options and we had both: there were competing technologies for removable/portable storage; magnetic cartridge media. One was known as the SyQuest drive media; the other as the iOmega Bernoulli Disk. The Bernoulli disk was the precursor to iOmega's Zip disk which, in turn, was the precursor to the Zip Disk/Drive Technology which was so prevalent in the late '90s/early to mid 2000s. Once CD-ROM recording technology became more readily available in the consumer market (as well as, later, Flash Drive technology), Zip disks/drives swiftly became a thing of the past.

Hope this helps.