Now I mentioned above that the connection between joshua and tartarus wasn't IP-based, it was just that of a dumb terminal.
Michael O'Reilly had a solution for that. He'd written a program called term that you would run on both ends and it basically implemented IP over a dumb terminal, proxying any connections joshua wanted to make through tartarus.
The catch was client programs on your local side (i.e. on joshua) needed to be "termified", i.e. modified to talk to term rather than the kernel's TCP/IP stack. But it worked.
And at some point, something amazing happened: I downloaded a "termified" version of Mosaic.