[b112]

This blew my mind as a younger person who took an interest in repairing tube radios from the 30's & 40's.

My Commodore64 had full motherboard schematics in the manual, and I had a 90s tube TV with schematics inside the back of the case.

This change, lack of docs/schematics has happened over a mere 20 years.

[pwg]

The Atari (400/800, from the Warner Brothers ownership era) also had full schematics /available/ (you had to buy the 'technical reference manual') but they were available. And part of that tech. manual was a printout of the 6502 assembly for the ROM OS.

And if I remember correctly, the tech. manual was something like $20.00 (in circa 1984 dollars, roughly $58 today, and you got about 400 pages of paper, printed on both sides.

So while schematics did not "come with the product in the retail packaging" one could obtain them with only the trouble of ordering a ~$20 (at the time) "book".