The Short Story

Established on April 28, 2004, HardwareHacks 2000 was originally a free and open Web help resource. Its founder was Don_HH2K, who remans at its head right now. In the fall of 2007, the site was re-launched with an emphasis on software development, hardware-related topics, and a social wing delivered by the Nostalgia Gaming Podcast. It is currently assisted greatly by the SillyDog701 community, where the bulk of software testing occurs and where our downloads are hosted. The pages are served on a self-managed laptop-turned-server using the IIS6/ASP.NET 2.0 Web development platform.

The Continuation of the Short Story

HardwareHacks 2000 started out in 2004 as a simple set of HTML pages hosted on Angelfire by the name, "HARDWARE HACKS". Primarily a sparsely-populated knowledge base of publicly-available useful facts and workarounds, the site failed to draw much attention. During this period, the pages were generated using various versions of Netscape Composer, ranging from approximately 4.08 to 7.1. During this early era the site jumped servers a number of times, eventually settling down on the servers of SillyDog701.

The move to SillyDog701 also saw a reformed layout that loosely resembles the current system and the change of the site's name to "HardwareHacks 2000". With the faster server, generous bandwidth limits, and copious disk space at its disposal, the site saw its first major hit in 2005 with the release of the Donzilla Internet Suite, an all-inclusive redistribution of the open-source Mozilla browser that could be considered something of a very basic operating environment in its own right. From midnight on January 1, 2005 to midnight of January 1, 2006, the browser was jointly developed by prominent members of the SillyDog701 forum community, and progressed over the course of exactly a single year from a largely unworkable 0.3 alpha to a full-fledged 1.0 gold release. While a 1.1 release was briefly in the works, Donzilla never passed version 1.0 due to changes in the organization of The Mozilla Foundation. In short, the codebase used by Donzilla and a number of extensions employed suddenly became incompatible, highly limiting the functionality of any future releases. Donzilla was pulled in September 2007, with the final estimated download total around 7500.

Concurrently with Donzilla came a number of other changes. To keep up with demand, the site moved from don.sillydog.com to don.mozfaq.org, hosted on the main dedicated SillyDog701 server. It was briefly hosted by Lithic Media (then Holycow Network), at which point it was rewritten in ASP. Eventually the content was moved to a self-hosted Pentium II box and subsequently rewritten to use ASP.NET 2.0. Later the server was upgraded to a 2GHz Celeron box to allow for features such as a forum and in-house e-mail. Our downloads are still hosted at don.mozfaq.org, as the site content is not hosted on a high-bandwidth link.

The Nostalgia Gaming Podcast marked the beginning of a turning point for the site beginning July 2007. Featuring two co-hosts, Don_HH2K and MetKiller Joe, it primarily signified a move away from HardwareHacks 2000 being solely its founder's design. The launch of a forum system quickly accompanied the change. In September, the site's content was pulled down, leaving the forums and podcast as the two services still available, while the rest was either weeded out or rewritten altogether. The site re-launched in late October as you see it now.