Those were typically made with [lettering guides](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lettering_guide) and [French curves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_curve) (I'd have liked to take a few pictures of mines, but I cannot recall where I put them: hundreds of hours at high school spent using them<sup>1</sup>), drawing with [technical pens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_pen) like _Rapidographs_. In certain cases, you could have also used [dry transfer letters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_transfer). As a drawing desk, a [drafting machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drafting_machine) was typically used (you can also buy tabletop ones).

In many cases, graphs and drawings were made by professional graphic designers, and that's why many old pictures look so good.

<sup>1</sup>A typical homework punishment in drawing classes for anyone who made too much noise in class was to fill an A3 sheet with text written with the smallest lettering guide.

**Addendum:**

I could find the lettering guides:

[![enter image description here][1]][1]

And while digging for the lettering guides, I could also find a graph paper that I drew when I was at high school using rapidographs and dry transfer letters, and with a tabletop drafting machine . It's a graph paper I used to plot the frequency response of amplifiers. Not exactly what you want, but just to give you an idea of what a non-expert could do with those tools.

[![enter image description here][2]][2]


  [1]: https://i.sstatic.net/PCdDb.jpg
  [2]: https://i.sstatic.net/kzS8Q.jpg