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.)
I am not a programmer. I find it fascinating what I could do with Claude to implement my ideas, so I relied on it to design and build this website while at the same time keeping it personal. While doing this, I hope I can learn more about the internet, and showcase the importance of archiving to preserve the memories and interactions of other humans, whether on the internet, or whether it is saved in decaying manuscripts. I hope you will see a value in this experience.
— Khalid Alshaikh
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.
⚠ 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 no browser has rendered in twenty years. This one loads and walks them. It is experimental: worlds built on features the loader does not understand will fail, and say so rather than hang.
- The dead CGI internet — the servers behind hit counters, guestbooks, polls and webrings are gone, so the archive shows only their husks. These are working recreations running in your own browser: counters spin, guestbooks accept your signature and keep it on this machine, polls take your vote, and webring links genuinely carry you on to another site of the period.
- 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.
- 35,790 catalogued sites — four 1990s CD-ROM directories, four printed directories, two years of a Usenet announcement group and six years of a weekly librarians' newsletter fused into one index, with period reviews, screenshots, 1,779 sites described by the people who built them, and 3,847 reviewed week by week between 1994 and 1999, plus a separate 9,070-site directory of the Arabic web to 2003.
Newly recovered: 1,898 site announcements from comp.infosystems.www.announce, the newsgroup where the early web introduced itself, 1996–97. Written by the people who built the sites. Every 1990s web archive of that group was served by a CGI script and every one of those scripts is dead. How we got them back →
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
gopher://hp84.com/and you are seeing exactly what a 1993 client would have seen. - The command line, which is enough, because the protocol is that small:
curl gopher://hp84.com/ - Floodgap's public proxy — a Gopher-to-HTTP gateway that works in any browser. It is the least faithful option and the only one most people can use: open the hole through the proxy.
What is down there: the full Early Internet Directory browsable by category, the Arabic Daleel 2003, a search prompt, and a record page for every site carrying its address, its period description, and the book or disc that vouches for it. The dead-protocol entries each suggest the http:// host to try instead — the same trick that works upstairs.
Served from a separate domain on purpose. hp84.com is a name I owned and never used; ge97.com stays exactly where it is. There is no TLS on port 70 and there never was — Gopher predates the idea. Nothing private is served there.
About the Operator
I am Khalid Alshaikh. I work as a national security analyst — nine years now, across governmental and non-governmental bodies. I live in Riyadh and spend stretches of time in the United States while I finish my studies.
Everything on this server comes from one instinct: that a record is only half the job. Things worth keeping should still work.
- Archiving Saudi history: My main pursuit here — recent Saudi history, and above all the history of Saudi football: match reports, club lineages, and the mergers that reshaped the teams of Al Khobar and Dammam. Much of it exists only on paper, and paper does not wait.
- Amateur radio — 7Z1FP: Working the bands and tracking satellite telemetry. The oldest way of keeping a signal alive, and still the most direct.
- Digital preservation: Rebuilding the early web so it runs rather than merely survives — including the Arab web, which was archived far less than the English one and is vanishing faster.
- Long-term investing: A dividend portfolio tracked openly on the Asset Tracker. Patience as a discipline — the same one archiving asks for.
Global Visitor Grid
* 7Z1FP HQ (operator node)
* Visitor Signals (hits by country)
x Land Grid (world map)
