I hope I may be forgiven if this thread launches me on a nostalgia trip. Those with sense enough to be repelled by such things - stop reading now.
Back in the fifties the most commonly available plastic adhesive was Testor's Plastic Cement, which came in a yellow tube. Drug stores and discount stores - the places where kids like me bought most of our models - carried it, and it cost ten cents per tube. For a dollar you could get a small Hawk, Lindberg, Aurora, or Comet aircraft kit, a couple jars of Testor's glossy paint, a tube of glue, and a brush. You had to give your mother and father careful instructions if they went shopping for you. Otherwise they might come home with Testor's Model Cement (yellow tube or white), which was made for balsa wood. Like I said, this is nostalgia time.
Bigger stores sometimes carried Testor's "liquid" cement (a slight misnomer: if the tube stuff wasn't a liquid it wouldn't come out of the tube), which was a watery substance that came in a glass jar with a brush in the cap. It probably was about the same stuff we call "Testor's Liquid Cement" today. And the hobby shops (if you were lucky enough to have one in your neighborhood) sold Revell "Type S Cement." It was similar to the Testor's tube stuff, but a little thinner. For a while some good hobby shops carried a tube cement made by Ambroid, which was my personal favorite.
Among serious modelers the tube cement market started going sour in the late sixties or early seventies, when the glue-sniffing fad started. Testor's and Revell, in response to pressure from angry parents and government officials, started mixing substances like oil of mustard into tube glues, in order to make them less palatable to sniffers. I suspect some potent chemicals were also taken out of the formulas at the same time. At any rate, the safer glues were much thicker and stringier, and dried faster. I was one of the many modelers who quit buying Testor's tube glue at that time. I continued to buy the Ambroid and Revell stuff for a while (it was thinner, and seemed to stick better), but both of them seem to have disappeared from the market some time in the eighties or early nineties.
In my personal opinion tube cement has its place; I wish I could find a source for a good brand of it. In ship modeling, which is my biggest interest, it's often nice to be able to put a tiny drop of adhesive on a part and know the stuff isn't going to go anywhere before the pieces are put together. But for quite a few years now I've been getting along with just the thin liquid stuff. It actually can be made to work in just about every application, I guess, but I do think there are places where tube glue would be preferable.
There's my two cents' worth. Sorry to take up valuable space with an Olde Tymer's reminiscences.