Re: Oh Lord I am old.....
The original 1985 LaserWriter had a 12Mhz 68000; every Mac available at its launch and for the next two years had an 8Mhz 68000. Having the separation of Postscript — usually mapped to QuickDraw on the then-two-colour Mac — is more or less what made the first generation of desktop publishing feasible. Your slower computer with the approximately real-time display could stick with bitmapped fonts, and the resolutions and colour depth were low enough versus available RAM that you could use binary masking for complicated shape things like path clipping. Your printer which was allowed to take a few seconds to produce the image of a page could do so with a much more rigorous approach.
... plus it was just a helpful way to 'multitask' back when none of the high volume consumer OSes were very good at it.