My first Linux box was a 20mhz 386SX laptop with 3 megs of RAM (1 meg on the motherboard, 2 in an expansion.) I could barely run Linux 0.99.x. The distro was SLS, and it came on 12 or so floppy disks. I quickly upgraded to a 486 with 8 megs RAM, then 20... which seemed incredible at the time (1994-ish.)

It's amazing how bloated today's software is...