That's too easy, I ran Linux on a 486 for years.
I still am...
I also ran KA9Q tcp/ip over packet radio on a 386 with
MSDOS for quite a
while (and I think I've still got the disks somewhere), does that count
as "online"?
Before I hacked this 5170, it has an 80286 processor (obviously). I ran
KA9Q on that to connect to Demon. I can't remember if KA9Q will run on an
8088, though. If it will, it would be easy to get SMTP and NNTP running.
-tony