Shame when these companies disappear. The place where I worked has been demolished now and is just a heap of rubble, although the parent company is still going.
I know what you mean: some semi manufacturers just don't care and others couldn't be more helpful. Altera once sent an application engineer over from the States, complete with a bag of FPGS and all the programming gear, to work on one our projects. He stayed for a couple of weeks too. Analog Devices are also particularly good as are their chips which always outperform the spec unlike some manufacturers. Their data sheets and application notes are good too.
In the early days we had a batch of Texas Instruments transistors arrive. They were MIL-STD-88B and had all the paper work: release notes dates, batch codes, etc etc. The only problem was that instead of being PNP they were NPN. By the way, I think Texas are one of the good companies.
Having said that Analog Devices are good, they did caused havoc on the project I mentioned in my previous post.
I have a thing about schematics and PCB layouts and always try to have the data and address buses in order so, for example, Do might go to pin 1 of a connector, D1 would go to pin 2 and so on. We had a great guy from the drawing office do the layout of the DAC board: it was a work of art. When I fired it up though, the DAC output didn't make any sense. Of course, being a pre-production part I thought it was faulty but apart from the weird output everything seemed to be working fine. I just couldn't figure it out, so I asked another engineer to have a look at the schematic, board, and DAC data sheet. He said everything was ok.
In the end I found the problem. This is representative of what was in the data sheet:
Would you believe it, D0 is MSB and D11 is LSB, the opposite of what you would expect. Analog Devices put it in brackets now but they still use the same back-to-front notation. So bang went the nice layout and, even though the wiring line did a neat job of reversing the connections, the circuit diagram looked like someone vindictive had been at work with the bus lines crossing and snaking all over the place.
Like you, I could tell many tales but I think I had better get back to the scope calibrator now.