I remember this period too. There were a number of problems, the biggest centred on something we have largely lost. Back in those days if you were on a paper ticket, it was relatively easy to switch airlines on a route. If you were on LHR-AMS and you arrived a bit early, you could get the BA ticketed endorsed (with a green label) so that you could take the earlier KLM service, or vice versa. The airline that flew you got most of the money, and they kept the top paper ticket to prove it. There was a brief period when this flexibility continued under e-tickets, but that meant you had to find someone skilled enough - and with time enough - to print out the e-ticket as a paper ticket, then endorse it, then you'd dash over to the KLM desks and they would check you in. Fabulous really, on short haul in particular, but there again fares were much higher, relatively speaking, compared to today's set-up.

The other problem was the couple of years that both tickets were operated. I think formally BA stopped paper tickets only about 10 years ago, but there was quite a period when a passenger could have either sort. If it was a paper ticket then it would be in the folder sleeve of the boarding pass, and if it was an e-ticket, the same boarding pass would have a printed note that there was no paper ticket. One of the agents' jobs was to check carefully that someone with a paper ticket had the coupon in the sleeve, since otherwise BA risked not getting paid; whereas the very similar looking e-ticket boarding pass would obviously not have the coupon in the sleeve. Occasionally, if you messed around a reservation too much, the e-ticket overprint saying no coupon would be missing, leading to much tut-tutting at the gate.

There is currently a series of letters in the Telegraph pointing out how things that changed have stayed the same. So for example, a car's glove-box probably doesn't have gloves in this era, but certainly did back in the day. And how the road sign warning for a railway level crossing without barriers or gates features a steam train, complete with a head of steam (and strangely, the same in France and Ireland too, though the designs are slightly different). In a sense airport issued boarding passes are the same - the design and dimensions of boarding passes still harks back to the coupon shape that used to be held with the boarding pass, but there is no particular reason why they should be that way any more, The home printed boarding passes have a bit of a nod to that shape too. Ryanair just has a quarter segment of an A4 sheet of printed paper.