Garden Eternal - Why This Site Exists

OPERATOR: KHALID ALSHAIKH STATION: 7Z1FP // SAUDI ARABIA

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