The Old Internet — a GE-OS 98 workstation
Somewhere in 1998, history split. On this branch, the system was never abandoned — it kept evolving, release after release, and it is still evolving today. The machine below is not a museum piece and not a recording: it is a living operating system, on loan to this terminal. Its dedicated home is 98.ge97.com.
What can you do on it? Everything you remember, and some things nobody else has. Power on and sit through the authentic Windows 98 boot sequence. Connect with a real dial-up modem sound. Open Internet Explorer and browse the old web as it actually was — the FindIt!97 directory catalogues 850+ real websites from 1996–2006, from GeoCities and Yahoo! to the early Arab web (Maktoob, Ayna, Arab News, the classic Saudi football forums) and Australia’s PANDORA archive. Then visit the museum’s rarest wing: 24 complete websites rescued from a 1996 CD-ROM — the 1996 White House among them, which even the Wayback Machine cannot show you — and the World Wide Web Directory of 1995, a book of 8,000 website screenshots, searchable and cross-linked to the archives, many of them the only surviving pictures of their sites. Play Doom, Digger, Minesweeper, Solitaire and 3D Pinball. Draw in Paint, poke around a real C:\ drive in MS-DOS, rearrange the desktop like it’s yours — because it is: log on and the machine remembers you. Old Flash and Java run again, MIDI music plays on de-archived pages, and an actual FreeDOS operating system boots inside the GE Virtual Machine. No install, no plugins: the whole experience, free, in your browser.
INSTRUCTIONS: Press the POWER button on the monitor (bottom-right, sound ON) and wait for boot. At the Welcome screen, type any name to create your account — this machine will remember you, and your C:\ drive will be here when you return.
GE-OS 98 Workstation
me_at_alqadsiyah_match.bmp (4.2 MB)
2 object(s) — better times, not deleted from memory
Type a user name and password to log on to GE-OS 98. A new name creates your account — this machine will remember you.
Assistant 98 lives in this machine. Ask about GE-OS, DOS commands, the apps — or say "open paint".
Have an idea for GE-OS 98, or found a bug? Tell us. The admin reviews every note, and good ones ship as GE-OS Updates.
GE-OS 98 has been updated!
On this timeline, the system keeps evolving. Here is what is new:
GE-OS 98
Continuation Edition · Version 4.10.2026
An alternate history: the Windows that never stopped.
Registered to:
You
GE-OS 98 — 98.ge97.com
Physical memory available to Windows: 65,536 KB
your computer.
(click to reboot)
Everything on this desktop is real, working software: a window manager, a shared virtual C:\ drive (the MS-DOS Prompt and My Documents see the same files), a spreadsheet with its own formula engine, physics pinball, and a registry. No code is ever executed from user input — the shell, the calculator and the spreadsheet all run on hand-written parsers. New in this release: log on at the Welcome screen and every file you create is journaled to the server — your C:\ drive persists across visits and devices.