I wonder why he didn't use a RP2350, it costs practically same as the older RP2040. That way it could have 450 kB or so system RAM, enough to play around with some old productivity software.

There's experimental support for it, getting just over 400KB of RAM, and someone was able to run 7.5.5 on it: https://github.com/evansm7/pico-mac/issues/7#issuecomment-23...