(Go back in time 20 years, and multiuser timesharing systems had lower specs than this. And a lot of good CS work was done on these systems; UNIX written, Emacs written, Vi written, gcc written, etc.)
I was there. That doesn't change the fact people expect different things from a desktop computer these days.
You know... You could run CP/M out of something the size of a coin if you really wanted to.
As much as I love keeping old computers alive using Linux, the nowadays common way using the web puts the spoke into the wheel.
Wheels fall apart if you take the spokes out. Pretty sure this was not the analogy you were looking for.