The entire environment was unlike what we experience today.
1. Confirmations - The passenger needed to call and confirm that they planned to fly, and to check and ensure that the airline hadn't made any changes.
2. Check-in - The passenger could roll up to the desk 30 minutes before the flight, hand over the luggage, and stroll up to the gate with six friends and two pets without anyone batting an eye most of the time.
3. Security - The security varied WILDLY from airport to airport and country to country. In Chile the military would search cars and taxis down to dis-assembling mufflers entering airport grounds, while small airports in the US sometimes forgot to turn on the metal detectors.
4. Loads - Regulation meant that the market didn't drive routes, and airlines had a hard time maximizing loads. I flew many trans-Pacific flights on L1011 / 747 / DC10 / MD11 aircraft with less than 100 passengers.
5. Aircraft - Because route frequencies were generally lower, airlines that could afford it flew big aircraft. Domestic US routes with L1011 / 747 / DC10 / MD11 aircraft were very common.
6. Amenities - Because electronic IFE was rudimentary, airlines provided a lot of different in flight entertainments, such as playing cards, vacuum tube music earphones, toy airplanes, coloring books, even small board games.
7. Smoking - Yes. All the time. First-hand smoke and second-hand smoke guaranteed.
8. Luggage - Wheelie bags were very uncommon, and most folks used these metal stroller contraptions that strapped to their bags with bungee cords, or else just muscled their bags by hand. As a result, cabin baggage was far, far less of a hassle than today.
9. Food - Hot meals for everyone, even in circumstances that don't warrant it, like a 45-minute flight! Seriously, the amount of effort that went into feeding people on flights was enormous, and many of the dishes served were real eye-openers in terms of new foods for me anyway.
10. Layovers - Connections were much less tight than today, so if you were flying a long route overseas, your transit points often included hotel stays overnight as part of the ticket. Certain hotels in places like Hawaii, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami made their money on just this trade.
11. Customs and Immigration - International flights would include a good hour of concerted paperwork effort at the end, facilitated by the flight crew who gave out customs forms, immigration forms, inoculation forms, etc. and then counseled people on what to answer, translated terms to people who needed it, handed out and collected back pens, checked your work, etc. Who needs IFE when you can enable government bureaucracy?
12. Single city, multiple airports - There were many world cities of note that possessed International airports and Domestic Airports, and if your itinerary included this arrangement, you would land in the INT and take a taxi to the DOM airport or vice versa. This was particularly fun in Asian cities when the taxi ride could be tens of miles in the middle of the night in Bombay or Jakarta or Bangkok, for instance, adding a certain zest of the exotic to your three-day journey to your ultimate destination while jet-lagged, exhausted, possibly sick, etc.
13. Porters - The airports of the 80s had many, many porters to haul your non-wheeled luggage from the curb to check-in or baggage claim to taxi for you. I recall Pittsburgh in particular as having friendly, muscly porters ready RIGHT NOW and RIGHT THERE to help you.