[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 ;)