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. It is where I document my work archiving recent Saudi history; the Windows 98 shell is the room I chose to keep it in. 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
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 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.
- 22,803 catalogued sites — four 1990s CD-ROM directories fused into one index, with period reviews and screenshots.
About the Operator
I am Khalid Alshaikh. I work as a national security analyst — nine years now, across government and non-governmental bodies. I live in Riyadh, and spend stretches 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)
Image Sandbox Area
This structural layout dynamically scales to showcase clean archival image updates:
Archival Scan 01
Archival Scan 02
