Even as late as in 2008 I had such a slow machine that when I had to use NetBeans and I wanted to listen to music at the same time, I'd just play music CDs with headphones plugged into the headphones port of the cdrom drive :)
I went through a rough patch from 2002 to 2009 and couldn't afford new hardware, other than when I was finally able to get a second-hand laptop.
Before the laptop, I'd go visit customers with my pc tower and ask for peripherals when I got to their office, fun times. Well, not really, but I can laugh now ;)