WWW browser for 8086
====================

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!


References:

[1] git://github.com/jhhoward/MicroWeb