The Old Internet - GE-OS 98

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.

The Catalogue

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.

Figure	Count	What it is
Everything in the directory	70,256	The two halves below added together. They are different kinds of evidence and the rest of this table only describes the first.
From the Lycos crawler	+ 34,735	Hosts in the Lycos index of October 1995, off the Internet Mania CD-ROM, that were not already here. A robot found these; no person chose them, and their descriptions are its automatic abstracts. Filed under Lycos crawler index so they stay separable. It also gave 11,262 entries we already had their first description.
Chosen by an editor	35,521	Entries in the index, not distinct working addresses.
Not usable addresses	– 268	Not addresses at all, once read properly.
The number I can defend	35,253	This is the figure quoted everywhere else on the site.
Was, before deduplication	35,790	269 records turned out to be the same sites listed by different 1990s directories, and were folded together — keeping every directory's own review and screenshot.

Why, and what the broken ones turned out to be —>

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 —>