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To be fair, x86 Debian will happily run on a Pentium II from 1998.

"Happily" is a stretch. I ran Damn Small Linux (because puppy actually wouldn't fit) on a 233mhz pentium II, with 32mb of RAM and it was..... semi functional (including allowing the USB 1.0 ports on the motherboard to work!) but multitasking or complex tasks caused it to hard lock up and I was too young and uneducated to diagnose the problems

I think my 440BX motherboard supported up to 384 MB of RAM--that would have helped a lot. You can still get PCI SATA controllers for fast swap. You're still capped at 133 MBps because of PCI, but PC100 RAM only runs at 800 MBps, anyway.

What's amazing about the PII is it's the oldest "modern" computer in a few ways. USB came out around the same time, and i686 is the oldest x86 architecture still supported by modern distros out-of-the-box. i686 will be 25 years old in November. The fact that it's still supported is incredible.

Yes, I still have AMD Duron 800 which runs on Linux

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