Since you mentioned you liked our stories, how about this one . . .
One upon a time (about 40 years ago), I was doing software development on a PC XT clone (running MS-DOS - which did not yet support a multilevel directory structure [i.e. no subdirectories/folders] on the 10 MB hard drive [it did support up to 512 8.3 filenames, without any directory listing sorting options - oh joy]).
Anyway, I was doing something (switching between multiple printers? [again, a very early MS-DOS, possibly a 1.x variant]) where I had to reboot the PC. Either a power recycle boot or a control-alt-delete reboot would work, but the latter took much less time. (For the power recycle boot, I programmatically jumped to the initial start address used by a power on boot - i.e. power wasn't actually cycled, but the full power on boot process was done, POST, etc.)
The starting address for a power on boot was hardware defined for the 8088, but the warm boot, control-alt-delete sequence, was software driven, and could vary between platforms. Basically, all I wanted to know, where the warm boot vector, i.e. the address to jump to, for the PCs I was using.
So, I contacted our distributor, and they said, you need to contact your reseller. I said, we are one of your resellers. Can you provide a technical manufacturer contact? They asked, what's the technical question? I answered I want the warm boot vector. They asked, what's that? I answered the jump address for control-alt-delete. They said, huh? I said, exactly why I want to talk with the manufacturer. I doubt you can convey the question as it make no sense to you, but the "right" person probably knows the answer off the top of their head.
The distributor did get me a direct contact with the manufacturer, and much of the forgoing was repeated. Including the address I want is likely in the BIOS you had to write for your PC.
Finally, they got a developer on the phone, who very timidly says "hello?" (I figure by this time, the developer was told there's some wild guy on the phone who has been ranting and raving about needing some technical information only those familiar with the BIOS [whatever that is] would know.) So, I say "hi, I just calling to find out if you can provide me the warm boot vector". The developer responded [off the top of their head], oh, that's 0xFF...... I said thanks, that's all I wanted to know. With that, the developer relaxes, and we spend the next 10 to 15 minutes talking shop - laugh. Oh, and that address did allow me to programmatically do the same as pressing control-alt-delete, which was considerably faster than using the initial cold start address.
BTW, I have directly programmed computer hardware; not much though, as on mainframes and minis, and later micros/PC, there's was usually some software (e.g. BIOS) to interface with that drove the hardware. But, back in the late '70s, on my own microcomputer (PCs came along a couple of years later), I wrote my own terminal emulator (in Z80 assembler), that directly sent text to the CRT (video), sent data to the printer port hardware (and dealt with printer status relayed by the port hardware), totally drove the RS232 UART hardware, etc. (Most network engineers - reading this - might also say - huh? - but you did note you "enjoy computer hardware".) The only "BIOS" support was, I could receive characters from the keyboard, through it.
My program worked fine, and was a great leaning experience! Interestingly, I wrote this program to print out another assembler terminal emulator program listing, which I could then use, after I assembled it, to download an even "better" terminal emulator, that supported various file transfer programs, like XMODEM, YMODEM, ZMODEM, save to disk, possible emulate some of the common ASCII terminals at that time, etc. (Could I have added such features myself? Probably, but as this program already existed, and was free of cost, I did not feel the need to.)
