All
I remember Pan Am/ TWA / AA/ BA ALL having quite good service as well, what happened, because it all went south very quickly in the 1990,s and I moved to European carriers. I spent my early business life on the North Atlantic and Arabian Gulf routes in the 1980,s as a young single man, quite, interesting as I remember !.
Security was also less for obvious reasons but we still had issues in Europe with Red Brigade / Barder Meinhof / IRA / PLO so we were not back in the 1960,s when all you needed was a ticket and passport, and you were through.
The seats in economy were bigger I believe, and if you look inside theVC10 at Duxford you can see the difference. However I agree with tdracer and his comments about Business class seats, and also inflight entertainment which is now in another league on some carriers to what was available back then. Also EXxb is correct flights did not seem to be so full, apart from during holiday periods, and there were not that many on the New York run especially for example. Also you did not have flights from the regional areas within the US as you get now, and the carriers were the aforementioned, with BCAL,Delta & NW at Gatwick, and that was it apart from charters as I remember (But it was a while ago, but those were the US / UK carriers I flew with back then). Thinking about I am not sure if Laker / Peoples Express/ Braniff/ World Airways / Virgin Atlantic were also not around then, but with very limited services so I did not use them.
Anyway apart from seat size in economy, I think on balance on the flying side I prefer flying today, however on the airports/ security/ service and to some degree in flight food, take me back to the 1980,s.