Cal,
Damper technology has grown by leaps and bounds since the 70’s.
The most advanced damper available in those days was the Koni double adjustable unit. It had bump and rebound adjustments and a very limited set of valving choices. I think that there was 8 sets of valves available. You had to send them back to Koni to have them changed.
The dampers used until the late 70’s were all double tube type. These were good units but limited as to mounting configuration and had a high tendency toward aeration and fade. They worked best when wheel rates were below 150.
With the advent of serious downforce in the 80’s becoming quite important, wheel rates by necessity had to increase. Also packaging became very important and damper mounting was a major part of this. You had to get them out of the air stream.
This is when the monotube type damper became the standard. This was a gas pressure unit that allowed running the damper in most any mounting position. The design and valving available was greatly expanded and wheel rates above 300 started becoming controllable. These were still the double adjustable type.
In the late 80’s and 90’s, Olins and a few other makers started looking at the telemetry data from the cars and realized that valving was not quite as simple as just worrying about your spring rate and sprung VS Unsprung masses. Shaft velocities and frequencies were way outside of the commonly accepted ranges.
This necessitated a whole different way of dealing with the motions. Damper bodies, internal valving, external rebound cans and low, mid, and high speed reservoirs all became part of the designs and also added complexity to the setup equation.
Dampers today have adjustments available for both rebound and bump just like the old days but with much more control of the motions. Now you can set the bump and rebound rates for low, medium, and high shaft velocities as well as stagger these rates across the range. Valving capability is now virtually unlimited and there are over 200 different
oil compounds used to vary characteristics and gas pressures of 1800 psi are common.
Also, no respectable race team goes to the track these days without a damper dyno and a specialist on setting up the damper units. These are specialists that do nothing but damper tuning and most of these guys are MIT grad types that talk in strange tongues about temperature-hysteresis effects, mid shaft frequencies and stutter delay.
If you are really serious these days, you will put your car on a seven post rig and simulate the motions for each track that you visit and preset your chassis settings such as damper rates from the test data that you develop while on the rig. (And still change them once you are at the track to meet surface conditions and driver desires.)
In all honesty, dampers have become so complex that I really do not know very much about them anymore and the my brain is having a hard time keeping up.