[quackduck]

> I succeeded only because my teenage self somehow pulled off a phone call to Motorola sales where I claimed to be an engineer "evaluating" the 6809 CPU and they sent me the manual and a quick reference card.

lol that is such a nice story

[dboreham]

Moto and the other large semi vendors back then had data departments that would send you any datasheet on request. My teenage self made many such requests, but in writing in order to not reval my age (in snail mail, everyone's an adult).

[vivegi]

Yes. Around 1994 when I was in college, a friend and I were into video graphics and Intel had a video digitizer chip. We wrote to Intel (snailmail) asking for the data/spec sheet and about two months later, we received a packet with about 120 pages of the data/spec sheet.