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Today's "tiny" distributions would be considered yesterday's bloatware. One of my first Linux desktops (Slackware Linux) ran on a 486 with 8 megs of RAM, including X11. This was a 1.x kernel. Running emacs would put it into swap.

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> on a 486 with 8 megs of RAM,

> Running emacs would put it into swap.

Heh; a time when "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping" was a literal comment:)

It sure was! I upgraded to 32 megs about a 6 months later, and it was amazing. I had never dreamed of so much memory.

X11 without WM was fine on 2.x as well on 8 MB ram. Loading fvwm or whatever I was using ended up with endless swapping.

I think I was using TWM or a very early version of FVWM.

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