What astonishes me is that they built the 747 first, before the small planes. It’s like Airbus’s birth was initiated with the Concorde, then the mass-passenger planes. All with negative timestamps, since we were before 01/01/1970 (joke).
Leaders of that time knew they had to start with the grandest project before cascading for a full range of smaller products; whereas leaders today roll out an MVP and try to grow from there.
It truly was another epoch, the epoch of mass amounts of money and resources, not little optimizations.
I don't think that's true. Pretty sure the 707 and 727 were launched and in service before the 747 even started development. The 737 was certainly in development as well, and was in service before the 74.
So by the time the 747 was flying with airlines, they already had the 707, 727 and 737 flying.
Boeing quite literally "bet the company" on the 747 and if it hadn't been as popular as it was the company would have struggled to continue, saddled with enormous debt and no products companies wanted to buy
Interestingly, one of the ways that they hedged this bet was by designing it to be easily converted into a cargo plane (though the assumption was the supersonic aircraft would be the replacements).
Leaders of that time knew they had to start with the grandest project before cascading for a full range of smaller products; whereas leaders today roll out an MVP and try to grow from there.
It truly was another epoch, the epoch of mass amounts of money and resources, not little optimizations.