Everything one needed was available; it just wasn't practical in the "consumer goods" sense. You needed an apochromatic flat-field lens, generally optimized spe

Everything one needed was available; it just wasn't practical in the "consumer goods" sense. You needed an apochromatic flat-field lens, generally optimized specifically for the magnification levels involved (since sufficient optimization over a very wide range of focal distances is an extremely difficult thing). The film has to be extremely low sensitivity to have good enough acutance (think ISO 6-12 as "high speed", since the emulsion needs to be extremely thin). You need consistent lighting so you can have a decent idea of what your exposure will be like, and before Polaroid polarization film cropped up, keeping glare under control was a bit of a bugger. You needed a rock-solid setup, since your exposure was going to take a while. The film needed to be kept very flat - there's far less room for any deviation than there would be for taking general photographs of the big world. In a world of silicon wafers, it's hard to remember that keeping pieces of floppy (and often tightly-rolled) plastic flat enough was once one of the hard parts. Processing was pretty critical - a little too long in the soup, and the black bleeds (that's how halftones are created using a line screen). So, you could get it all going with a decent copy stand and lights, the right (expensive) camera and lens and a goodly amount of faff... or you could get a service that had a dedicated process camera that paid for itself through constant usage and craftspeople who do that sort of thing for a living do it for you for a smallish fee. If you had regular archiving needs, the cost of the set-up wasn't horrible - it was certainly cheaper than a process camera for printing plates. It just wasn't a home-and-small-office thing by any normal standards. Most of it, though, you could do now with an "eBay special" camera and lens and a bit of ortho-litho film. It's still available as sheet film. That would mean red reads as black and non-repro blue is a thing. Panchromatic repro work would be a lot harder since Kodak killed off Technical Pan. Tech Pan was kind of super-fast film, though - you'd use it at "ISO" 20-50, depending on the application - so while it was spectacular for general photography, it was just at the edge of what would be useful for microfiche.