Yeah, that absolutely used to be the case. People would get preprints of their paper and you'd just ask them and they'd send you one. I think I remember someone saying 'can you send it back as it's the last one I have'. Nowadays they'd just send you a PDF, I'm sure.
Whether that works for people enquiring from non-academic addresses I don't know. In the fields I care about so much is now on ArXiv that it is, ehem, academic.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
