This reminded me of someone I worked with once. He was tasked to reverse engineer a piece of kit that had an 8 bit embedded processor in it, and the source code was lost.
However, rather than use a disassembler, he was content to hand disassemble the program. We didn't have the tools, and it seems that no effort was made in getting any. I did talk about tools to him but he wasn't particularly interested. Our manager didn't really know anything about embedded development so he didn't intervene.
After about three months, it was obvious that the task was going nowhere so our manager put an end to the task.
I remember loads of paper covering his desk (and lots of bits of rubber!). To his credit though, he did use a pencil for his hand disassembly and not a pen.
;-)
Regards,
Paul.