This sounds as a crazy idea but such thing [1] really exists! It has
been written for Intel 8088-compatible machines. If you remember, the
NEC 8088-compatible CPUs were quite common in portable and handheld
computers of early 1990s (the HP 95LX to the 200LX, for example).
I have a PSION MC600 laptop. Yes, a laptop which run on 8 AAs and which
runs MS-DOS 3.3. It has the above mentioned NEC CPU, some 640kB of RAM
and the 640x200-capable monochrome LCD. So it fits the MicroWeb
hardware requirements. The only missing thing (at them moment) is an
Ethernet connection. I might fix this in the future.
Anyway, the MicroWeb can also read local files. Thus I issued the
command:
microweb -c news.htm
The -c switch forces the 640x200 resolution and the news.htm, of
course, was the pre-downloaded file with some news.
It works surprisingly well. The browser is text-only but it uses
different font sizes for different HTML elements. Loading took several
second but scrolling of the file was smooth (one can use cursor arrows
to line-level scrolling or the PageUp and the PageDown to scroll
screens - the later is less smooth as re-drawing of screen needs some
time). The HTML ahs some 100 kB. This might not sound like a big file
but the machine has only 640 kB (not MB nor GB!) of RAM available.
I must say I am really impressed. And did I mentioned that I ran my
MC600 at 4.77MHz. There is a full speed obtion (8 MHz) but I forgot to
turn it on.
Now to find way how to connect the MC (with its special ports) to some
sort of a network!
