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title: GE-97 Terminal — a working museum of the early internet
description: GE-97 is a personal browser-based project that recreates a working Windows 98 environment to let users experience the 1990s web as it actually functioned — not...
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og:description: GE-97 is a personal browser-based project that recreates a working Windows 98 environment to let users experience the 1990s web as it actually functioned — not...
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# GE-97 Terminal — a working museum of the early internet

**[Two Stop Bits](https://daily.dev/sources/twostopbits)** · 8 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

GE-97 is a personal browser-based project that recreates a working Windows 98 environment to let users experience the 1990s web as it actually functioned — not just as screenshots. It restores Flash, Java applets, MIDI audio, VRML 3D worlds, guestbooks, hit counters, and webrings, all running client-side. The project also serves a Gopher directory over the real protocol on port 70, catalogues over 30,000 1990s websites from CD-ROM and print directories, and includes a separate 9,070-site index of the Arabic web up to 2003. Built by Khalid Alshaikh, a national security analyst in Riyadh, using Claude as a coding assistant, the site's deeper mission is archiving Saudi history — particularly Saudi football — and eventually hosting a live SDR radio receiver.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://ge97.com/>

## Questions this post answers

### Why can't I open a gopher:// link in Chrome or Safari?

Chrome, Edge, and Safari never supported the Gopher protocol or removed support years ago, and Firefox dropped it in version 4. Clicking a gopher:// link in these browsers does nothing because the protocol itself is no longer implemented client-side. Workarounds include a dedicated Gopher client like Lagrange or Bombadillo, the command line via curl gopher://, or a Gopher-to-HTTP proxy like Floodgap's public gateway.

_Anyone digging into legacy internet protocols can track odd browser quirks like this one on daily.dev._

### What was the Gopher protocol and how does it differ from HTTP?

Gopher was a pre-web internet protocol released by the University of Minnesota in 1991 that served menus of numbered items over port 70, with no images, layout, or scripting, just plain text and a navigable tree. It lost out to HTTP within about three years of release, though a few hundred Gopher servers reportedly still run today.

_Developers curious about internet history and old protocols can follow deep dives like this on daily.dev._

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---

Tags: [#golang](https://daily.dev/tags/golang)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/ge-97-terminal-a-working-museum-of-the-early-internet-znoa3arph)

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