[Wavytone]

When I started in the early 1970's...

... many had made their Newtonians using the book by Texereau and the ATM books - 6" f/8 were pretty common, most serious amateurs had an 8" f/7, a few 10" f/7 and a couple had 12" f/5, one had made a 12.5" classical cassegrain. Like many before me I made a 4.25" f/5, then a 6" f/8, then an 8" f/7 mirror over the years 1972-75.

The Dobsonian hadn't been invented and most newtonians including mine were on equatorial mounts, typically with 1.5" heavy steel axes in bush bearings, a 6" or 8" worm wheel made of bakelite or aluminium if you were lucky, and a synchronous motor running off the mains for tracking. No autoguiders, and tracking manually with a guidescope was serious tedious. Few scopes were really up to doing photography through the scope. Big, heavy and only just portable.

Refractorites were typically using 3" - 4" Unitrons, invariably f/15 achromats on very tall wooden tripods. Mostly the Unitron altaz mount, a few had the equatorial clock drive.

A few guys had orange Celestron 8's... one had a Questar 3.5"...

No electronics - for photography you used a guidescope with a cross-hair eyepiece, and tracking in RA was usually very limited, tracking in dec was done with a screw driving a tangent arm.

Speaking of photography - no digital cameras - an SLR body was an expensive luxury at that time and you used 35mm film. Push-processing ektachrome film was common. If you had access to a machne shop, you could make a "cold camera" in which the film was clamped to a perspex plug and chilled with frozen C02 to stop reciprocity failure, giving lovely results (for that era).

Eyepieces were really dreadful compared to modern ones - very ordinary kellners, bad orthos, maybe a plossl if you were lucky, and none were parfocal. The big gun in widefield eyepieces was a 60mm Unitron kellner, in a 2" barrel.

CNC machining had not been invented, neither had the Crayford focuser. A big Unitron rack and pinion focusser was something to aspire to (if you were upmarket). A very lucky few had the Unitron "Unihex" (a rotating gadget that held 6 eyepieces).

Oh yes and at the silly season the shops were full of 40 and 60mm Trashco refractors, which were as useless then as they are now.