In the old days, static publishing (or baking, where the CMS generates static HTML files at publish time), was pretty much the standard. Most of the WCM products on the market did static publishing: Interwoven, Tridion, RedDot, Percussion …. Even the frying systems like Vignette and FatWire (FutureTense/OpenMarket back then) relied so heavily on caching that they were practically baking style systems. Computing power was so expensive back then ...