Yes, the year was 1988, the promotion was with American Express and the Eastern Airlines frequent flyer program that said if you bought an airline ticket with the AmEx card, you earned triple miles. It lasted a few days as other airline then said you could use any credit card, and then a few days after that one of the other airlines said it didn't matter how you paid, thus setting off the great Triple Miles promo of 1988.

Point of reference: most of the programs had 1,000-mile minimums in those days and the flights between Oakland and SFO were packed with mileage fanatics.
In fact, that is when we first started to use the term "mileage run"