MC> Well, I am not saying that it would be easy, or that it would be worth
MC> doing, but would it really take *millions* of dollars for implementing
MC> Unicode on DOS or Windows 3.1?
MC> BTW, I don't know in detail the current status of Unicode support
MC> on Linux, but I know that projects are ongoing.
Okay, I'll byte, although I prefer to speak of ``free Unix-like
systems'' rather than Linux only.
The easiest way of browsing the Multilingual web on a 386 with 4 MB of
memory and a 10 MB hard disk is probably to use the text-mode ``lynx''
browser in a terminal emulator that supports (a sufficiently large
subset of) Unicode.
One such terminal emulator is the Linux console, which only supports
the very basics of Unicode. An alternative is the XFree86 version of
XTerm, which also supports single combining characters and
double-width glyphs. (Enough, for example, for Chinese or Thai, but
not for Arabic.) In order to use that on a machine such as the one
outlined above, you'll probably need to build a custom X server to
save space, but it's definitely doable. (Drop me a note if you need a
hand.)
I know of the existence of fairly lightweight and fully
internationalised graphic browsers for Unix-like systems (Konqueror
comes to mind), but I doubt you'll get away with much less than a fast
486 with 12 MB memory and 100 MB of disk.
Regards,
Juliusz
