You are underestimating the information that was available in the late 90s on the Internet. If anything, thanks to DOS game development and demoscene still bein

You are underestimating the information that was available in the late 90s on the Internet. If anything, thanks to DOS game development and demoscene still being active, you could find stuff much easier than it is nowadays (there is a lot of material over the years that is sadly lost - especially when it comes to making some arcane "official docs" more understandable). In the late 90s as a teenager i wrote a small OS at my free time for my PC (running on real hardware) with its own assembler, compiler, primitive text-based UI (think TUI, not command-line) and documentation system (growing up on Borland tools i always liked how everything was documented and made a simple hypertext system since this is how i perceived real serious software to be - though in hindsight it had atrocious UX since there was no mouse as my PC had no mouse). My two main limitations were my lack of experience and limited understanding of English. But the knowledge available to me was abundant.