A PURE-HARDWARE GOPHER CLIENT

I was thinking about how it's a shame that there isn't much 
electronics stuff on Gopher. Particularly my favourite sort of 
electronics - without microcontrollers, just pure digital or 
analogue circuitry fixed in a opimised system to efficiently perform 
one ideal purpose. Then of course I realised that I was part of the 
problem because all of my electronic projects are documented on the 
web. Yet I can't mirror them here because I'll loose my anominity, 
and they probably won't mean much to the average gopherspace 
explorer anyway.

So I thought that what I really need is an electronics project just 
for my gopher hole. Something that would mean enough to Gopher users 
that it would be worth documenting it here instead of on the web. As 
an internet protocol, Gopher exists purely in the software domain 
that I prefer to avoid for fun personal projects. But Gopher is so 
very simple that I wonder if I could design a software-less, 
CPU-less, client to browse it with?

From a user-interface point of view, the challenge isn't much 
greater than with a standard hardware terminal. Historical examples 
of commercial hardware terminals are well known, I think I even saw 
a prject to restore one in someone's Gopher hole. But they also have 
a long DIY history, beginning with Don Lancaster's TV Typewriter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Typewriter

I've got his later books "Cheap Video Cookbook" and "Son of Cheap 
Video" that detail derivatives of this design, reducing the part 
count by including the more advanced ICs introduced in the late 70s 
and early 80s, and also increasing the line length/count to 
something that would be vaguely usable for viewing Gopher content. 
They are a good basis for a terminal which might be easily adapted 
to treat specially any lines with a tab chacter, storing them in a 
separate buffer where they can be retreived and their corresponding 
link followed.

A modern design for a terminal built with TTL logic, for a VGA 
monitor instead of a regular TV, is here:
http://debuginnovations.com/TTL_Terminal/home.html

Though that does use a microcontroller for the UART and PS2 keyboard 
input. I understand this decision, but I'm a purist through and 
through and wont accept a CPU anywhere in a Pure-Hardware Gopher 
Client. Still, it could be adapted to work TTL-only.

But the other main difficulty is the TCP/IP stack. Attempting to do 
this with TTL logic would be much more difficult than just dealing 
with the Gopher protocol. But I'm not contraining myself to TTL or 
discrete logic only, just a CPU-less client, so I can use one of the 
TCP/IP Ethernet chips from Wiznet:
https://www.wiznet.io/product/tcpip-chip/

I won't deny that even with these resources to draw on, this will be 
a very difficult project, but at first inspection it seems possible. 
I don't have the time for it at the moment (and have plenty of other 
projects that I ought to finish first anyway), but one day I think 
it would be good fun to attempt.

 - The Free Thinker, 2020.