In college (2002-2008), my computer was often 'whatever the hell I could get my hands on'. My laptop died, so I wound up borrowing my parent's 500mhz pentium with 64 mb of ram as my 'college machine'. Shockingly, it could actually run firefox at the time.

Anyway, this meant that I didn't have a computer when I visited them. The only one left in the house was a 486 with 24 mb of ram. What's an enterprising coder to do? Did I really want to leave my cs homework until I returned? No! So I put slackware on it, and let me tell you dillo ran wonderfully, at least well enough to pull up javadocs. I'd edit my src files locally, ssh into my uni's unix lab, transfer the src files there and compile. This workflow was surprisingly productive, or maybe it was just the sheer force of will young devs have. I honestly think having to 'figure things out' with bad hardware is a great learning experience.

I am now sitting beside my workstation with 64 GB of ram and 24 gb of vram and a beefy 16 core cpu. It alone has more L3 cache on the cpu than I had ram in either machine back in the day!