Back in the day this piece of leather was THE toe strap to use if you considered yourself a serious cyclist.  They were more than twice as expensive as then next best toe strap, but they worked so, so well.  They held your shoe fixed to the pedal better than anything else available at the time.  Sean Kelly used them, Greg LeMond used them around his Time shoes even though he was was using step in Time pedals to win the '89 Tour de France. 

They were also a fashion piece.  At the time, most people were looking to see if you were wearing the latest jeans from Guess?.  For us bike racer types we looking to see if the guy next us was using Alfredo Binda toe straps.  If you were really serious you would use Alfredo Binda toe-straps to hold your spare tubular to your saddle. 

I must digress here for a moment.  Some of you may not know what I am talking about when I refer to toe straps.  There was a time before step-in (clipless) pedals where we all used toe-clips and toe-straps.  Our shoes had a cleat fixed to the underside of our wooden soled shoes.  Those cleats had a thin slit that slid on to the back plate of our Campagnolo quill pedals.  The metal (Campagnolo) toe clip was attached to the front plate of the pedal and wrapped up and over the top of our leather shoes.  The toe-strap threaded through a loop at the top of the toe clip and held our foot fixed to he pedal.  It was effective. 

Most of us used tubulars (sew-ups) as our training tires rather than clincher tires that are the standard these days. Changing a sew-up after a flat and spending the weekend repairing those punctured sew-ups was still preferable to using the poor quality clinchers that were available at the time.  Instead of carrying a saddle bag under our saddle we strapped on a spare tubular in case we flatted.  And yes if we happened to have an extra Alfredo Binda toe strap we would strap that tubular tire to our saddle with that top of the line toe strap.  It was a fashion statement.

  I also came across this interesting Dura-Ace rear derailleur.  It is older to be sure, but what makes this derailleur interesting is the fact that it represents one of Shimano's early attempts at indexed shifting. In their early versions the indexing was located at the derailleur rather than the at the shifter in the way that we use it these days.  As you can see in the photo below there we several indexed "teeth" located on the back side of the derailleur.  There was a catch that would snap on to each tooth as the the downtube shift lever pulled on the cable.  Each of the teeth were spaced in such a way that the snap would align with the cog on the freewheel.  On this particular derailleur there were five teeth which allowed for use with the (then) more advanced six speed freewheels.