Pentium (or compatible) with at least 16-MB RAM, 1 GB disk, IDE or USB CD-ROM, IDE hard disk. Minimal installation (without the commands sources) 8 MB RAM and 50 MB of disk. SCSI disks not supported
@vampiress for comparison, my current MP3 (well, FLAC) player - a Shanling M0 Pro - is based on an Ingenic X1000, a MIPS system-on-chip with about 32 megs of RAM and a comparable amount of horsepower to that Pentium 200. It is super useful to me in that use case. You could probably get a lot of utility from it.
I think @nev has a different use case but similar motivation to extract maximum utility from performance-light systems?
@vampiress You should give Haiku a go. There's a 32-bit version that supports BeOS binaries and the 64-bit version is modernized with a range of apps, but lacks support for the original programs. I've been running it on a ThinkPad T400s Core2Duo and it's blazing fast. Regardless of what you choose, have fun :)
@vampiress That might be hard. i586 instructions, so anything compiled for i686 wouldn’t work. Unless it’s a Pentium Pro? And things like graphics drivers for hardware that old might be gone from newer Xorg. But now I want to try it.
@vampiress Part of the problem with that is that general purpose computing changed architectures so often, even if was just under-the-hood.
You want to really go back to that era, you need Ultrasparc. Roughly 1995-2001 or so. I have an Ultra5 with a 400Mhz that I still use.
This version of 64 bit was so complete that you can still install a modern version of things like openssh (encryption), browsers, etc via the latest version of https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/sparc64/.
@vampiress I'm remoting into another box with rdp on a pentium 200 right now. Also have an irc client on it, backup web server and a few other things.
Mind you, I have 200M and not 32.