Why Hackipedia.org?

Motivations for building and maintaining Hackipedia.org
by Jonathan Campbell
March 1st, 2010

   If there is one frustrating element of the Internet and print media
regarding computers, it's the lack of useful information on what you
can do with your computer at the low level. By that I mean the low
level hardware interfaces. What I/O ports or memory mapped registers
do you work with, and what do you write? How do I talk to this
controllor or chipset? How do I take a file format of this or that
type and work with it?

   For an experienced programmer like myself, it takes a lot of work
to wade through all the crap on the internet just to even find the
documentation to answer these questions. Often, the documentation
is incomplete, or obscure, or badly written to the point that it
becomes a frustrating endeavor to even TRY to program the hardware.

   Now think of how detrimental that is to the industry overall:
If it's that hard for someone of my experience to learn programming
90% of the hardware out there, imagine what frustration it is for
a young bright programmer just starting out? Besides the lack of
any low level programming overall and apparent mistique of hardware
is it any wonder most programmers today are afraid of hardware level
programming? Most people I know are used to a cushy GUI environment
with complicated APIs that somehow take care of the magic below.
And yet if these people were to lose their fear, pick up some key
concepts, and dig into the lower levels, they would actually find
that the concepts involved are actually quite understandable, an
arrangement of many simple concepts put together.

   Being able to work at a low level, with hardware, file formats,
protocols, connectors and virtually any part of your computer is
absolutely vital if innovation is to continue in the computer
industry. The only thing killing innovation, it seems, is the
unwillingness to look into low level details. Without low level
details, effective hacking is impossible. You are enslaved to the
implementation you depend on.

   The situation is worse with regard to file formats. If you are
unwilling to look at the low level details of a file format, then
you are dependent on tools to read it for you. If that software
becomes unmaintained and obsolete, then too bad. Consider the
ironic result: binary data can be infinitely copied from medium to
medium without loss, yet "rot" happens because the newer
program is unwilling to interpret the data for you! But you will
never lose your data if you know how to meaningfully interpret
those bytes yourself.

   I built Hackipedia.org to solve what I saw as a problem of
both lack of documentation, difficulty in finding the information
you need, and lack of a useful common reference that both new and
experienced and programmers could use in times when they need to
dig down into the low levels. These files are a subset of many
useful bits of documentation that I have been collecting since
1996 and they are carefully arranged for reference by type,
platform, operating system, and subject. The on-site files are not
the entire collection, many files I would otherwise like to share
are not included because they are still under copyright,
and there are thousands of additional files that are still being
sorted and arranged and yet to appear in this collection.

Hopefully, my collection will help save you and other programmers
hours of fruitless and unproductive searching on the internet so
that you have more time available for constructive things to do
with your computer.