TITLE: Writing papers in pre-LaTeX era?
QUESTION [75 upvotes]: I wonder how people wrote papers in the pre-LaTeX era? I mean, when typewriters and simple computers were (60th-70th?). Did they indeed put formulas by hand in the already printed articles?

REPLY [6 votes]: In the 1960s I was writing at North American Aviation memos and then a book explaining application of Kalman Filters to celestial navigation for the Apollo Lunar Mission which had complex matrices, etc.  The typists at North American Aviation told me these equations could not be typed.   I bought a set of Type-it symbols and a used IBM Executive typewriter which had half spacing for superscripts and subscripts.  I enlisted my wife and she typed
my memos and book, mainly to show it could be done.  The typists ended up being very grateful to me, because I showed upper management that if they would provide some of the typists with the same Executive Typewriters and boxes of Type-it symbols they could save money by not having these memos, etc. sent to printers!