I have to disagree. A pentium at 100mhz was enough to run winamp and play 128kbps mp3 without any hiccups. Doing more than that at once was complicated, but not impossible.
Changing from one window to another allowed me to see widgets been drawn. It wasn't snappy, but it wasn't a crawl. I could still open a dos window and run qbasic or turboC. I had to be careful: drunk pointers risked stability of the system.
At the time I never had the same thrashing problems I have today running linux. That is why I'm so hopeful about systemd-oomd.
I could keep the machine like this for almost a whole day. A windows 9x machine rarely passed 24 hours uptime with heavy usage without a bluescreen.
I later upgraded the machine to 64mb ram, 2 harddisks, 2 floopy drives and both cd drive bay became occupied: one with a cdrom drive and the other with a cd burner. I then replaced the winmodem with a network card. It was a good machine. The only thing that barred me from using linux on it was the soundcard (AZT-R2316) that had no linux driver. It 2mb s3 video card worked better with linux. By the time the sound drivers arrived it was 2007 and I already had a new linux-only 2006 machine.
On "highly compatible", well, you could run mandrake and send drakconf and KDE to the trash.
I remember there was one software decoder that was fast enough in 1995, so I plugged in my Pentium/100 laptop to decode music and pass it uncompressed to my desktop Pentium/90 (which was too slow) over 10base-T!