Dial Up Internet on DOS 3.20 using a real TCP/IP stack and browser at 300bps

This is a more elaborate version of the setup used in an earlier video: https://youtu.be/p0d2ogyQ0ys

In that video I'm dialing into a server using a terminal and letting that server handle TCP/IP instead of the local machine. This type of thing was pretty normal in the 90s (and before), but I got to wondering - would it be possible to run the entire TCP/IP stack and browser on this machine instead?

A redditor had pointed me toward Microweb, and after a while I settled on dospppd as a packet driver for the modem. Everything worked fine on a 9600bps modem, so I stepped down to 2400bps, then 1200bps, all working great. At 300bps though things fell apart. Turns out that you can't actually negotiate an LCP connection inside the default 3-second timeout used for most ppp connections when you only get to negotiate at 300 bits per second. After some tweaking, and a healthy extension to the LCP timeout, 300bps was working. Moving to the laptop things fell apart again - the CPU overhead for header compression seemed to cause more timeouts. Disabled header compression, and we're live!

The result is in this video. Note that I'm cheating this just a little bit. First, I'm using i.reddit.com, because it took over 20 minutes to render the normal reddit.com. Also, I'm using a modified version of retroproxy (https://github.com/kralamoure/retroproxy) to handle the https to http transition since Microweb doesn't support https for obvious reasons. By default retroproxy minifies html and resizes images, but I've modified it to send 0-byte images instead of resizing them, which helps with download times a bit.

The laptop is a Zenith ZFL-181 from 1987:

* Intel 8088 at 4.7MHz
* 640KB RAM
* 2x 720KB 3.5" Double Density FDDs
* 640x200 Monochrome CGA LCD
* MS-DOS 3.20

Huge thanks to jhhoward for their work on Microweb (https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroWeb), without which this wouldn't have been possible.

0:00 Boot up
0:27 Modem prep
0:38 Dialing
0:55 Start TCP/IP stack
1:03 Ringing
1:09 Connecting
1:39 Starting browser
2:14 Loading Reddit (sped up)
2:40 More loading (real time)

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