Looks very uncomfortable for medium to long haul flights, in contrast to the passenger cabin, which offered a level of luxury previously unknown in commercial aviation, even including sleeping areas for first class travellers;
The Stratocruiser was indirectly developed from the Boeing B29 bomber (specifically having been developed from the military C97 transport, which itself was based on the B29)
For its day it had a number of innovative features including a pressurised cabin and a lower lounge deck, making it one of the first double-deck passenger airliners. 20 years later, Boeing would return to the double deck idea with the 747, this time moving the lounge deck from the bottom (essentially the space taken up by the B29's bomb bay) to the top just behind the flight deck.
The 747 had originally been designed as a heavy transport, with an hinged nose cone to allow long loads to be taken on board, which is why the flight deck is so high up, necessitating the provision of the upper deck
The Stratocruiser, while groundbreaking in many ways was not profitable for Boeing, mostly due to the relatively short production run (only 56 were ever made), and most of its operators had retired the type within 6-10 years of it entering service, in favour of the faster turbojet powered aircraft such as the hugely successful 707, which was my dad's favourite of all the aircraft he flew. He described it very much as a pilot's plane that had just enough automation to make it relatively easy to fly, but not enough to turn the pilots into passengers,,,
He never got to fly the Stratocruiser though as they had pretty much all been replaced by the time he joined BOAC.
Many of the retired Stratocruisers went on to be converted to transport duties, with several being aquired by Aero Spacelines, where they underwent a series of radical conversions into super-heavy transporters such as the Super Guppy and its variants, which were designed to move large aircraft parts quickly and efficiently. The first of these was called the Pregnant Guppy and was built primarily for NASA to transport sections of the Saturn V. In this archive photo it's very easy to see the 377 Stratocruiser lineage;
![1280px-Pregnant_Guppy_NASA.jpg 1280px-Pregnant_Guppy_NASA.jpg](https://www.cruxforums.com/xf/data/attachments/1511/1511191-e8fce633adff428fd9593f72265ff17a.jpg)