I used SLIP all the time back in the day, and I use MIDI all the time in my home music setup. The wikipedia articles don't tell me anything I don't already know.

I suppose someone somewhere has done it (and I have always said that you can), but my best internet searches with a wide variety of terms don't show any old tutorials or products that explain how. Nor can I find anything else that uses MIDI to send tcpip packets over the MIDI connection. Not even a mention.

My Google-fu may be totally weak, but whatever.

I freshly, happily and totally concede that people have in the past used MIDI to send SLIP packets, and it is well understood how. Great. You are totally correct.

But all of this just proves the original point. It either precedes anything on the internet today, or is so obscure that no search engine can find it. Either way, if no one uses it or even bothers to explain how, I think it is pretty fair to conclude that it is rather unergonomic, and hacky, and doesn't provide all the features one really wants in a network connection.