A lot of hardware had exceptional documentation in the past. I have extremely high end equipment from the 80s and almost all of it came with a booklet with a co

A lot of hardware had exceptional documentation in the past. I have extremely high end equipment from the 80s and almost all of it came with a booklet with a copy of a complete hand drawn schematic including part numbers, test points, procedures for repairing and disassembling... And then it all stopped, seemingly because building equipment became cheap enough to do that they started worrying about duplicates. Now you end up with errors that you'd never get if people were still able to learn how nice stuff works, by making it dangerous to publish the designs publicly now no one has detailed implementation references. Sure, things like the RPi and Arduino exist so you can find open hardware but it's nothing like when almost everything was open by default. I wish things had gone down differently but things made post 2000 I end up throwing out far more often than stuff from the 1980s. Some of that is selection bias but a lot of it is having access to detailed repair manuals.