[neartheplain]

In any plausible doomsday scenario, would scavenged Z80s (with compatible displays and input devices) really be more readily available than old Intel-based laptops, or even Raspberry Pis?

And if your post-collapse computer can’t read PDFs or play videos, how much useful preserved information can you really access?

[curryst]

> Can assemble Z80, AVR and 8086 binaries.

Quick Googling says that most modern x86 chips should be able to run 8086 binaries. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

> And if your post-collapse computer can’t read PDFs or play videos, how much useful preserved information can you really access?

Most websites that don't use JS to load the important content. It's also worth noting that there doesn't seem to be any way to connect normal mass storage devices. It can read from floppies and SD cards. Some people still have floppies, but I would have to imagine there's a lot more useful information laying around on SATA drives.

It doesn't matter if it can read PDFs or play videos if you can't read the storage devices those are on.

[Gaelan]

Just Wikipedia would be huge.

[ben_w]

“Just Wikipedia” exceeds the 16-bit address capacity of a z80 by a factor of 288,391 [0] even when compressed. Heck, you couldn’t even list all the article titles even if they were all an average of one character long.

Plenty of useful things you can still do with a z80, but at that tech level paper and ink is a better storage system than silicon and magnets.

[0] As per Wikipedia’s stats page, the size of current versions of all articles is 18.9 GB compressed

[dharmab]

You don’t need the entire dataset to be addressable. Just a working set. How do you think we played 20GB video games on our Pentium 4s?

[ben_w]

Much as I enjoy seeing old machines on the modern web [0], they’re still the wrong tool for the job and the wrong job for the tool.

We did useful stuff with computers even back in the 60s when transistors were the technobabble plot device for how Iron Man could fly [1]; we just used them to calculate solutions rather than as electronic libraries.

[0] https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/File:ContikiBreadbox64.png

[1] https://comicbooktheblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/iron-man-and-t...

[dharmab]

I wasn't thinking a web browser, more like a WikiReader [0]. A tiny microcontroller, a text display and a flash memory card with an offline copy of the Wikipedia database.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader

[ben_w]

The microcontroller in that is significantly more powerful than a z80 ;)