I recently went to a baseball game with my girlfriend and we picked our exact seats then went in, first thing i thought was how was this done prior to computers? Was it all done with general admission, with a first come first serve rule? Were there seperate ticket windows for seperate price sections?
In my experience, printers had the ability to print tickets for each seat by section row number. These were then arranged on board by the same. You then asked the box office for the ones you wanted.
Of course you had to deal directly with the box office.