# Ancient Web: Hackman's Realm Defended MS-DOS on a 1998 GeoCities Homepage Hackman's Realm, founded in April 1998, mixed deep hands-on programming guides with contrarian essays about DOS, Linux, personal computers and the joys of understanding hardware. 2026-09-30 :: Switchboard Tech Services ![Ancient Web: Hackman's Realm Defended MS-DOS on a 1998 GeoCities Homepage](https://switchboardtechservices.com/static/images/defaults/articles.webp) Part of the [Ancient Web Collection](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-collection/). A page advertising things that MS-DOS can do better than Linux sounds like somebody trying to start a computer-club argument. At Hackman's Realm, such an argument sits beside tutorials on actually programming the machines. [Visit the preserved Hackman's Realm homepage](https://www.oocities.org/siliconvalley/2072/). The page dates its founding to **April 30, 1998** and describes itself, disarmingly, as a website about nothing. What follows is an enormous contents list: introductions to C, Java, BASIC, Pascal, assembly, LISP, Perl, Python and SQL; computer hardware; socket programming; synthesizers; flight simulations; and personal essays. The webmaster says the whole site was made in a plain ASCII editor and designed to work with the text-only Lynx browser. One link in the original site's queue, preserved as [What MS-DOS Can Do That Linux Can't](https://www.oocities.org/siliconvalley/2072/dosvslnx.htm), belongs to a conspicuously opinionated group of essays. The exact article is not presently retrievable through the available archive, so its title establishes the subject but not a verifiable list of arguments. It would be wrong to invent that list. ## The machine was supposed to belong to its user The surrounding [archive's main index](https://www.oocities.org/siliconvalley/2072/) is much richer. It links a polemic about Windows XP, another about Microsoft's newer operating systems, an explanation of why graphical interfaces are not always better, and a short lament on the loss of hands-on computer engineering. The author describes increasingly closed hardware and inscrutable software as betrayals of the original personal-computer ideal. There is practical work alongside the rhetoric. A [surviving serial-port text file](https://hk.oocities.org/siliconvalley/2072/serport.txt) lists modem-control registers and assembly instructions for switching the RTS and DTR signals. Other links lead to Z80 and 6502 computer-building projects, sound-card programming and a little game-development work. This was not an operating-system benchmarking lab. Its judgments are the writer's views, preserved with all the impatience and personal preferences of a self-published site. The unusually durable homepage also survived into later online discussion. A [June 2025 Hacker News thread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44244340) revisited the DOS-versus-Linux title as a period artifact, with readers arguing about the assumptions of old and new machines. Hackman's Realm is valuable for showing how a personal Web page could function as a classroom, scratchpad, technical manual and argument with the entire computing industry at once. [Explore its original topics and linked experiments](https://www.oocities.org/siliconvalley/2072/). Part of the [Ancient Web Collection](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-collection/). - Categories: [Ancient Web](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/categories/ancient-web/) - Tags: [#linux](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/linux/), [#ancientweb](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/ancientweb/), [#programming](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/programming/), [#geocities](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/geocities/), [#msdos](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/msdos/) [Articles RSS](https://switchboardtechservices.com/feeds/articles.xml "Subscribe using an RSS reader") --- Canonical URL: https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-hackmans-realm-defended-msdos-on-a-1998-geocities-homepage/ Language: en-us Content type: article Author: Switchboard Tech Services Published: 2026-09-30T19:34:52+00:00 Modified: 2026-10-18T21:02:27.314514+00:00 Description: A surviving GeoCities mirror shows one programmer's text-only repository of C, assembly, electronics, DOS utilities and unapologetically personal computing arguments.