Oh wow, now I feel old. I remember compiling and running Java course work on a laptop with 8MB of RAM. The display was monochrome, and the compiler literally took ten minutes to spin up (as go get, and drink a cup of coffee before it's done - probably swapping like mad). But it worked well enough with x11 and fvwm.
I see i was on a supercharged "pro" workstation with that much ram, though:
> There were two or three reasons for starting FVWM and RXVT. First, I had a need 33 MHZ 486 laptop PC with only 4 MB of RAM, and I thought linux and X11 were way better than the windows versions of the day. X11 with TWM and xterm would run on my PC, but just barely.