Ancient Web: Hackman's Realm Defended MS-DOS on a 1998 GeoCities Homepage

Part of the 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.

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, 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 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 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 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.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.