Gulf Air required min rest in 1976 as a tempory concession from crews.
However min rest grew more and more common and is now an accepted norm by the controlling Caa and medical advisors...ie as they do not have to do it.
Min rest in my experiance is a killer and thoes that have done it as a norm in Gulf Air are now either dead before retirement age or have had a serious health event shortly after retirement.
Actually min rest in my day at Gulf Air 1974 until 2000 was in the ops manual as.... 9 hours at the hotel.
On landing ground staff were always the first to burst in gabbling away demanding the new earliest departure time of our next flight after min rest...they needed this information to relay this to ops Bahrain........if you were foolish enough to give them a time.... this became law... you and your crew were now on yourown and potentially in deep doo doo...basically you had screwed yourself.
The result of your foolishness in cooperating was no ground staff to speed you through customs/immigration etc.. and you and your crew would hang around for ever in 35degrees plus for the crew transport.....
The better approach was to say.. "I will call you on arrival in my room at the hotel with the new departure time, what is your name and what is your staff number, and your telephone number"....(you did all this because sometimes rooms on min rest were not available or only some rooms were available, some were still dirty and steaming from previous crews.
For my sins I was not going to have my crews asleep in the hotel lobby on min rest or waiting for hours for a room or subjected to forced shareing of rooms, washing and changing in airport toilets etc....)
Having got my crew accommodated I phoned the new departure time into Gulf OPs Bahrain and the airport also adviseing that crew min rest of 9 hours would start again if we were phoned within 8 hours from now by anyone before our wake up call....this attitude resulted in telexes being slipped under hotel room doors which crews could if awake and so inclined read....generally it was to advise us of further delays or extensions of several days to our blocks...I once went on a three day block and was required to remain away for 17days over Christmas and New Years
.... my Captains voyage report was not believed in the fleet office and I was called in about it...basically they did not have a clue what was happening to their pilots down route and had zero authority to do anythying about it.