Then you may find this interesting... The lab I worked at BGM Colour Lab was one of the first in Canada to get a Premier System, I left the company to start my own little BW shop before the Premier launched world wide, but I had lots of visits to my friends at BGM so I was well aware of its incredible design and application, which you should be very proud.
At BGM I worked on a Lisle Overhead Camera system that used Xy bubble memory system computers that drove an overhead copy camera that had front light and back light HK head to expose film of any type.
Using masks in the back of the camera that was pin registered and pin registered mylar which had stripped in trans , negs and positives we could manipulate the images into position.
The back end had the ability of rotating and moving masking blades .0001 inch at a movement.
This unit was in its day 500k to purchase and I remember meeting the young man who owned Durst Italy , he looked at this unit and a lot of Lambda design was figured out with this primitive device I used.
The Premier was exactly in between the Lisle and Lambda as you would make incredible film negatives with the Premiere and then enlarged that film.
I have always been dissapointed that I never worked with the Premier as I was one of about 10 techs worldwide to work on a Lisle Camera and now I own a Lambda for a lot of the alt negs I talk about here can be made with it and for sure the Premier system could do so as well.
One of my heros is Jerry Uelsmann who could make things float on film.. I am not sure how many here know how incredible his work is.. Bob Pace was another who worked on Photo Comp and IMO nowhere near
the skill level as Jerry.
At our lab we had the Lisle and I had two full time assistants at all times, but we also had five other Photo Comp specialists who needed to know how to handle a knife, Micro Modifer, line and lith film, with ruby masking and as well using an enlarger to blend it all together. This department was called the Repro department and all the techs were very strong in their ability's and complimented each other and helped each other on the more complicated projects.
One little know Canadian fact.. It was illegal to photograph a cigarette package for advertising packaging, so we had to start with a roll of white paper and with a knife start making the packaging to mimic what a real pack of cigarettes would look like, This was something I never did as one really needed to have a skill set that I did not have, or the patience as one cigarette ad would take a week for one of our techs and would cost the client thousands of dollars.
The Premier was the first wave of devices that made this labour intensive work more exacting.
When I was doing the initial development work at Kodak in the late '80s that led to the Premiere Image Enhancement System (film in -digital photo comp - film out), I visited many commercial labs around the US and was always amazed at the skill and time involved in making photo comps; I saw many examples of fantastic in-camera masking photo comp work.
Premiere still required an operator with artistic skills, but made them more productive.