They had to know what materials to use, which alloys, load bearing weight of the materials, how to place and configure them, etc.
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Though it seems impossible to design complex things today without a computer that is almost entirely an artifact of design methodology and the format modern engineering aids, not an actual requirement of the process. A great deal of the information used by architects and engineers for designing buildings used to be contained in published paper books that contained tables of safe loads for various materials and other design information. Computers make that information more accessible, but they don’t change the process used to test materials and gather the information in the first place.
Similarly, the calculations my father did to create and read physical blueprints in the 70s aren’t conceptually different from what we do with computers now, or really that different from what Archimedes was doing a few thousand years ago. Some of the most enduring design principles and mathematical ratios in architecture are thousands of years old.
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