August 2, 2026
Dial-up drama has entered the chat
GE-97 Terminal: The Old Internet
This retro web revival sparked a fight over fake nostalgia and AI-written vibes
TLDR: GE-97 Terminal recreates the feeling of using the late-1990s internet in your browser while also serving as a serious archive project. But the comments quickly split between people admiring the preservation effort and critics mocking its AI-sounding writing and questioning whether its retro feel is truly authentic.
A lovingly built trip back to the late-1990s internet has landed online — and, naturally, the comments immediately turned into the real attraction. GE-97 Terminal is creator Khalid Alshaikh’s browser-based tribute to the era of dial-up, Windows 98, old web pages, guestbooks, cheesy music, and forgotten corners of the internet that have mostly vanished. It’s partly a digital time machine, partly a living archive, and partly a personal project about preserving Saudi history and radio culture. Sweet, sincere, and deeply sentimental — which is exactly why the peanut gallery showed up with knives out.
The loudest reaction? A brutal side-eye at the writing and design. One commenter came in absolutely exhausted, blasting the site’s style as “Claude artifacts,” basically accusing it of sounding like AI-generated fake-deep poetry instead of normal human English. Another took aim at the machine itself, saying the Windows 98 look doesn’t even really feel like Windows 98 and asking the killer question: “Was this vibe coded?” Ouch. That line alone feels destined for meme life.
So the drama is deliciously split: one side sees a moving act of internet preservation, a way to experience the old web as a living space instead of a dead museum. The other sees a nostalgia costume — stylish, clever, but not authentic enough, and maybe too dependent on AI to sell the mood. In other words: people came for digital history, then stayed to argue about whether the history had the right wallpaper and whether the soul was written by a chatbot
Key Points
- •GE-97 Terminal is a browser-based Windows 98 project created by Khalid Alshaikh to recreate an interactive 1990s web experience.
- •The article says much of the early web has been deleted or survives only in limited archives where original media and interactions no longer work.
- •Alshaikh positions the site as both a retro-computing experiment and a platform for documenting his archiving work on recent Saudi history.
- •Planned additions include a web-accessible SDR receiver and live 2 metre band radio signals from station 7Z1FP.
- •The unfinished GE-OS 98 environment restores legacy technologies and behaviors including Flash, Java applets, VRML, CGI-era interactions, old HTML rendering, and downloadable shareware.