GE-97 Terminal — a working museum of the early internet

OPERATOR: KHALID ALSHAIKH<br>STATION: 7Z1FP // SAUDI ARABIA

Garden Eternal

My first time online was 1999, in an internet café with my cousin. The internet was still a new thing in Saudi Arabia then — you went somewhere to use it. The machine in front of us ran Windows 98 . It was another two years before we had a connection at home, and by then the world had moved on to Windows XP.

So Windows 98 is, for me, an era I met exactly once and never got to keep. That is the feeling this site is built around — not nostalgia for something I used for years, but for a doorway I walked through once.

Most of that early web is genuinely gone. Not archived, not sleeping — deleted, with servers switched off and nobody keeping a copy. What little survived sits in archives where you can read it but not use it: the Flash will not play, the music will not sound, the guestbooks cannot be signed. The library kept some of the books; nobody kept the room they were read in.

This is the room. A browser-based Windows 98 that boots, dials up, and browses what remains of the 1990s web with everything switched back on — built so a modern audience can feel what that screen felt like, not just look at a screenshot of it.

But this site is not really about the old internet. Windows 98 and the 1990s web are an experiment — an attempt to go back in time and see whether a machine and a network from thirty years ago can be made to work again, properly, rather than be looked at behind glass. What the site is for is documenting my work archiving recent Saudi history. And it is where I intend to put my radio work next: an SDR receiver anyone can tune from this page, and the 2 metre band from station 7Z1FP — signals going out live, in a room built out of an era that has already gone.

The name is a small joke about permanence. This domain went up in 1997 as General Election 97, I took it on as Growth & Earnings 97, and it is now Garden Eternal — the same two letters, a third life, a place where things that died elsewhere carry on growing. (خالد — eternal — is also my name.)

— Khalid Alshaikh

MAIN EXHIBIT: GE-OS 98<br>STATUS: RUNNING

The Old Internet

An alternate history: in 1998 the timeline split, and this Windows never stopped shipping updates. Boot it, log on, and the whole machine is there — Explorer, Notepad, Paint, MS-DOS, Solitaire, a Doom-style FPS, an assistant called Disky who can actually read your disk, and an Internet Explorer that reaches the real archived web.

▶ BOOT THE MACHINE

⚠ WORK IN PROGRESS. GE-OS 98 is being built in the open and is nowhere near finished. Things break, features land half-done, and some corners are still empty rooms. That is the point — it is a machine that never stopped being updated. If you find something broken, there is a Suggestion Box inside the Start menu.

What we brought back that nobody else runs:

Flash & Java — .swf movies and 1990s applets play again, inside the pages that hosted them.

The sound of the web — background MIDI and tracker modules, the music every GeoCities page had and no browser will play.

VRML worlds — the 3D web of 1996, which literally nothing renders today. Walk through it.

The dead CGI internet — hit counters count, guestbooks can be signed, polls can be voted in, webrings actually ring.

Frames, layers and blink — the HTML modern browsers deleted, rendered the way Netscape drew it.

Download and run — pull shareware off a 1997 page, unzip it onto the virtual C:\ drive, and it is yours.

30,164 catalogued sites — four 1990s CD-ROM directories and four printed directories fused into one index, with period reviews and screenshots, plus a separate 9,070-site directory of the Arabic web to 2003.

SERVICE: GOPHER HOLE<br>gopher://hp84.com/ — PORT 70

The Gopher Hole

Gopher came before the web. You connected to a machine on port 70, it sent you a menu of numbered items, you picked one, and it sent you that. No images, no layout, no scripting — just text and a tree. The University of Minnesota released it in 1991, it lost to HTTP within about three years, and a few hundred servers are still quietly running.

A good part of this collection was born in gopherspace: 496 of the catalogued addresses are gopher://, recovered from directories printed when that was a normal thing to publish. It seemed wrong to hold them only behind HTML. So both directories are now served over the real protocol, from a real server, on the real port:

gopher://hp84.com/

⚠ YOUR BROWSER CANNOT OPEN THAT. Chrome, Edge and Safari never supported Gopher or removed it years ago, and Firefox dropped it in version 4. Clicking the address above will do nothing at all. This is not a broken link — it is a protocol the web decided to stop speaking.

Three ways in, in order of authenticity:

A real Gopher client. Lagrange is the pleasant one and renders UTF-8, so the Arabic directory is legible. Bombadillo if you prefer a terminal. Point either at...