At least twenty. Could be even older, that stuff was becoming obsolete mid eighties, most places had computers by the nineties.

I was really fast, I mean really fast, with that stuff, keyline and paste-up, line tape, cutting ruby, all that stuff, but I was taught by guys who were sooooo fast that they were faster BY HAND than any kid on a computer that I've ever hired who learned and worked solely on the computer.

Some of those old guys were amazing.

Thanks for the info, yeah, I never throw anything out either, including a stack of zipatone that's yellowed, brittle, stuck together or all three. I found you could 'half-erase' dots or cover areas of grease pencil for some interesting gradient effects. That's an obsolete skill though with all the shading possibilities of Photoshop. I'm sure if I used the stuff, any punk editor would ask me if I had enough light to draw by --in my cave.
We're very quick to embrace whatever's new and forget that people did the same things by and large with more effort, maybe, and probably more skill as well.

I remember running across an old manual that had a section with the twenty-two steps needed to make a duo-tone, back in the day. I like the newfangled photoshop method better.

Duo-tone. At first I thought you were talking about the old Doubletone Craftint board that used two photography chemicals applied by brush to bring out fine parallel shading lines. But, I looked this up and found out it was a way to use two colors in printing what was basically a monochromatic image, but with a lot more richness and nuance. After that, I discovered that even my 5.0 dinosaur version of Photoshop has some duotone functions! Using it though is still a little beyond my tech level. Have you tried this out yet? My understanding is that you can work this in RGB mode which is all I've used to color in so far.
And here's a guy who duplicated the craftint process in Photoshop, although his image links don't seem to work.
http://micomics.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=Ink&action=display&thread=115

Photoshop 5.0? I used to run that on a 486. I upgraded the program (and the machine) in the Spring of 1999.

I've seen those before. I found some editorial cartoons in a box at a printer I worked at years ago, that were done on the craftint boards. I had always wanted to try it but it seemed expensive.

We used to use duo-tone images all the time, back when people did a lot more two color jobs. Now that full color is more cost effective and digital printing is so competitive it's cheaper than actual printing sometimes, the only time you see people using them is when it's an artistic choice, not a budgetary one. I don't remember it being in RGB? You had to set it up for spot color printing, so the image would separate correctly, I forget how, it was so long ago. Most everything I do now is either for color printing or digital printing, so I don't have to stress over spot vs cmyk any more. Or whether I used the coated pms tag or uncoated. But I think in photoshop it goes, convert to grayscale, then duotone. These days it's easier you just have to convert the duotone to CMYK, and some digital printers will be ok with RGB.

I never had to do a duo-tone, I never worked in the darkrooms, I got to just indicate where I wanted one. Some times on really cheap jobs, we would cheat and place a 5 or 10% screen of whatever color over the halftone image to do a sort of cheater duo-tone, (solid screen on the color plate, halftone on the black plate). Or you could even put just your halftone image on the color plate, it really depended on the photos how successful either of those techniques were.

Good for you, always being first. You must feel very special.

Are you sure? How else would a jedi's spread butter! You can't spread butter on toast or with a lightsaber, it melts too fast.

I heard somewhere that it's a stupid craftsman who attempts to drive a nail with a screwdriver.

Thanks for the link. His technique sounds like it would work pretty well. I bet it would work with any compatible patterns. Cool, something to play with...

I was still using a 486 in 1999 (Pentiums first came out in 1993). That was way behind the power curve. I'm still on a dual-core (with Vista and CS3) now.