I wonder if gaming consoles had a big hand in this? Going back to Atari pong in the early/mid 70's and I don't recall if any of the major players (Magnavox, Atari, Coleco, Sears) included anything close to schematics.
I remember in the late 2000s hating everything about the mobile revolution and predicting where it would go. I was mostly right but wow did people ever think I was nuts. Tech groupthink back then was the literal phrase “mobile is the future” repeated like something out of a political talking points memo.
What I got wrong was underestimating how evil social media would become. I never imagined how addictive it could be made or how toxic the content would get, or how it would help re-mainstream a whole raft of horrible ideologies. The addiction factor and brain dead content machine really hit with mobile too, so it’s not unrelated. Something about that little screen that is always there and swiping to scroll seems to facilitate addiction better than a PC or laptop screen.
So for at least Atari, and at least with the 400/800 computers, they did release the information. For an extra cost, but it was released.
> Before the introduction of VLSI technology, most ICs had a limited set of functions they could perform. An electronic circuit might consist of a CPU, ROM, RAM and other glue logic. VLSI enables IC designers to add all of these into one chip.