I currently finding that besides the original Intel developer manuals, I am having great difficulty finding original technical documentation on bits of hardware such as PICs, FD controllers, VGA, VESA etc.

I know there are many tutorial on the internet, but I wonder if theres any tips I can get for finding the original documents?

Jamie

Welcome on board.

http://www.osdever.net/documents.php?cat=0&sort=1
http://www.vesa.org/public/VBE/vbe3.pdf

Thanks for that. Quite some useful stuff there.

However, I am also after original documentation from manufacturers as apposed to that which is written by third parties, which I can't find much of anywhere!

Hello,
For Floppy Disk search for "Intel 82077AA CHMOS SINGLE-CHIP FLOPPY DISK CONTROLLER"
For PIC search for "Intel 8259A PROGRAMMABLE INTERRUPT CONTROLLER"
For Vesa the link from ManOfSteel is good
For VGA there is many document on the net ,also original IBM,if you are interested to original IBM i can post you a link,
For other Google is your friends, type the number of standard controller and go
example:
"Programmable Interrupt Timer 8254"

The VBE document is right from VESA's website and the osdever's documentation section contains many original documents (e.g. FDC document from Intel).
What about Intel's website: http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/datashts/290566.htm ?

for general and not deep help on hardware, helpppc is a good compagnion.
it describes a lot of little stuffs like PIT, PIC, KBC, FDC, HDC, UART, etc, etc...
for advancedc stuff, it isd mainly on osdev.org and some other on a dead link.
keywords in google
osdever "wout mertens keyboard"

look here: http://www.nondot.org/sabre/os/articles