Now I'm really sad that I don't have the manual for the TI-99/4A which was the first computer I used. IIRC it's where I learned everything about both operating it and programming it, starting from nothing. It's so true that we just don't have anything like it anymore.
In the late 70s and early 80s I did a lot of programming on Texas Instruments DS/990 computer systems.
The manuals for those systems were quite interesting.
If you had a question, you could read the manual and swear that the manual did not answer the question.
Once you figured out the answer by some other means, if you went back to the manual and read it carefully you would discover that it actually did answer the question precisely.
I don’t think it was just me. Several of the people that I worked with on that project reported the same thing.
I really enjoyed working on the 16 bit mini computers from Texas Instruments. They were a lot of fun.
I have some of the TI-99/4A stuff that I had as a kid (and a few machines), but now I notice that the hardware is notoriously undocumented. Compare to something like the TRS-80 Model 100, which has full schematics and even a book written about things like how to write 8085 assembly to get the PIO chip to buzz the buzzer[1]. I have read that TI was very un-hobbyist/tinkerer and suffered in the market as a result.
For another era of stuff that I used growing up, PCs were by then complex enough (286/386/486 era) and/or commoditized enough that the systems weren't well documented.
