[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 ;)