I think there are not many digitizers left that learned to punch (yes, it really means punching... holes in a card) the hard way.

Before you could even start to punch, you needed to hand draw an amplification of your design. This was very tedious work. Not only you had to use a projector to amplify your design 6 times it's original size, you also had to draw and indicate each single stitch into your drawing. This work was extremely time consuming as you can imagine. In many cases, the artist was a different person than the puncher. The artist however had to know a thing or two about embroidery back then.

He used tools like compass, various types of rulers and hand held wheels with spiky points to *** little holes into the paper. That was needed to be able to determine densities for satin and fill stitches.

Below you can see a couple of images showing an example of a typical enlarged drawing, a portion of it for the fill area and also a picture showing some of the spiky handhel wheels.

Ah, not to forget, in those days prices per 1000 stitches were around US$ 50.- to US$ 60.-