Good question!!
I think it would be fun to go back to 1972, mid-year at a Sears store.
They still had the super-tall centerpost 18lb washers with the whopper Roto-Swirl, which I have never seen "in the wild" as they say. There was such a variety of models regular capacity models that year, maybe 15 different machines including carry-overs from 1970 and 1971. I was fascinated by the control dials used by most models in combinations of all white, half white/half chrome, and all chrome. They still had the porcelain on steel tub rings, and most models had differing consoles from the next, as in the 1960s.
I focus on this year though because my Mom got a new dryer that year, and I was in the store for part of that, just enough to be thoroughly intrigued, but I was just too young to absorb the details I would have later (and probably too short to look at the machines in detail without a booster stool, lol).
Gordon