Around the same time that I got my first programming job (mid-1970’s), I was also working part-time as a stripper. There were no poles involved, I got to keep my clothes on (to pretty much everyone’s relief), and nobody stuck dollar bills in my underwear. Instead, I took photographic negatives that had been shot in a giant, walk-in camera and taped them together on a light table and then burned lithographic printing plates from them by shining ultraviolet light through them onto the photosensitive plates.
What I actually spent most of my time doing was examining the negatives and, using a small paintbrush, repairing small holes that inevitably appeared in the negatives. I’d just look for the errant spots, and brush a little opaquing fluid (a slurry of clay in water) over them. But my official job title was “stripper.”
I was thinking about this earlier in the week when I printed a large sign to take to a protest. As I was putting the sign together, I noticed little white spots where the laser printer had failed to deposit toner. I pulled out a Sharpie and began repairing the flaws, and remembered my job as a stripper. I honestly hadn’t thought about it in some decades.
Not long after that job, I started a company that did digital typesetting and burned plates directly from the digital files. It was the very beginnings of what would become desktop publishing, though we were never able to get funding to bring the system to market, mostly because the venture capitalists we talked to all said something like “we talked with the people in our print shop, and they tell us what you’re trying to do is impossible.” At the time, typesetting still involved movable lead type or a photographic process using, essentially, rub-on letters.
It would be another eight to ten years before Apple released the LaserWriter and the printing industry was forced to recognize that typesetting directly to the page was possible. I doubt that there are any (print shop) strippers working anymore.
—2p