Originally Posted by davester

That's nonsense. I've been riding derailleur bicycles since the mid-60s and that has never been the case except for racers. For the few years that I raced I ran corncobs and big chainrings. The rest of the time I (and everyone else that I rode with) rode much wider range gears. That said, triples generally did not come stock so it was an expensive endeavor (just as it is now) to change out the double chainrings for a triple crankset. For that reason many of us bike tourist types used doubles with wide-range derailleurs and 14-34T freewheels to get the gears we needed.