That’s exactly why I bought a tablet with 8″ 4:3 display. It’s quite good for reading A4 sized PDF—a bit to the smallish side in portrait mode, but still very readable. And the rotate and zoom can more than compensate.
I won’t bother you with naming the model - it was a cheap Chinese one, which I selected as a compromise of screen size (7“ 16:9 is too narrow), weight (10” ones are heavy as hell) and battery life (10h of use).
Was this by any change a reference to Permutation City? That was 17× slowdown, but that could be explained by taking the ratio of real+simulated time. But I do not get the “sixteen major tracks of memory” then.
Far fetched, I know...