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The intended use of my string-centric computer is to facilitate communicating over the internet, so how'd I handle it?
Handling the core TCP/IP stack wouldn't take much on practically any CPU, beyond multitasking so threads can block as they await responses. Though TCP also requires counters & timeouts as it verifies it sent successfully.
Caching & port dispatch would be trivial on our string-centric CPU.
Early-boot would stick to UDP-based protocols, on the off-chance it needs internet.
1/3
Beneath the TCP/IP stack we'd need a unique MAC address stored in read-only memory & a wired or wireless connection to nearby devices.
In the case of wireless we'd need to wrap a radio transceiver in real-time processing circuitry ensuring packets are sent successfully. By sending & receiving acknowledgements, & determining when's an acceptably quiet time to send.
Wired would require little if any extra circuitry to ensure the bits are encoded correctly.
2/3
The Application-level protocols like HTTP would start really using our string-centric CPU! Yes, HTTP'd be wrapped in a layer of caching.
Usually response bodies would be dispatched to the appropriate code for decompression, text-transcoding, & interactive-rendering. With headers saved aside in a key-value trie.
Then there's cookies to track & update.
As for encryption (with TLS), I'll give that its own thread.
Internet's why I incorporated the security measures I did, fear of malware.
3/3!
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