Hi.

I recently bought some 386SX 25Mhz laptop to develop some software as well, and I worked on low-end hardware for over decade as well(for fun!)

My findings: You could run NetBSD 1.3.1 on just 2MB of RAM.

You can play mp3 on 486DX 66Mhz with mpg123 and madplay if you change the output to 22khz and few other flags.

Pentium 100 was enough back in the 2001 to run Slackware 7, BeOS and NetBSD 1.6.1 with mp3(in lower quality), Opera web browser, few consoles, text editor - at same time without hassle, AND burning cd-rom at the same time.

Then GOOGLE "invited" Ajax in 2004 and now even computer with 2gb of ram and 1.6Ghz dual cpu, can't open simple page with JS without serious stutter...