[captainmuon]

Why was leaking tech docs considered such a problem? I could imagine any competitor large enough to copy implementation from docs and unscrupulous enough to do so would be able to get their hands on all your docs anyway (say, a Microsoft exec hiring a PI, ...). But what's the harm if anybody else gets their hands on the docs? Is it some abstract legal "we must not accidentially make any forward-looking statements", or is it just not wanting to make anything public just in case?

If anything, I would think you'd want to have technical documentation circulated as widely as possible, so application developers don't have to reverse engineer your interfaces (which would take longer and be more error prone).

[bombcar]

All computer companies at the time were deathly afraid of Osborning themselves, which may be part of it.

Also feature parity between systems didn’t exist so they were still trying to one up each other.