As a maintenance engineer trained on very early 747’s how many remember the following-
· A Main Landing Gear Load Evener system.
· A Standby Horizontal Stabilizer Trim system.
· Engine Nose cowls with suck-in secondary doors like the JT3D powered 707’s.
· 400-600LBs of ballast weight in the outboard engine nose cowls.
· Rotary Engine Start/Ignition switches as used on 707, 727 etc. Replaced by individual ignition toggle switches to enable single ignition starting to quickly identify an inoperative ignition system after too many delays caused by dual failures.
· 2 or 3 cockpit placards stating ‘Disregard spurious indications during HF transmission”. One was applied to the engine oil quantity indicators if I recall correctly.
· No Body Gear Steering ARMED – OFF switch. BGS was active whenever aircraft was on the ground.
· No Auto Brake system.
· Memory tells me the very early Rudder Pedal/Nosewheel Steering interconnect was mechanically activated by a flexible push/pull cable from the nose landing gear (the cable used to break and was replaced by an electrical actuator system).
· Cool Gas Generators for slideraft inflation (a pyrotechnic device that instantly turned the liquid in the bottle into a gas, mounted in the upper door bustle).
· Rotating anti collision beacons that needed fairly frequent relamping.
There are probably more but these are ones that come to mind.