Quoting Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom <chrome at real-time.com>:

> I've decided to finally give Slackware a try (about 5 years after
> hearing
> about it...). 
> I have a 486 w/12MB of RAM and will probably end up with a 340MB HDD. I
> want
> to set it up as a web server. (before you all shout out that 'you need
> more
> memory than that!'; remember what it used to be like, before memory was
> cheap.. it's not going to be a high-performance box, and I don't care.)
> 

Seems to me I used to run RH5.something on a 386, 8-16MB RAM (don't recall), 
500 MB HD. Was running all sorts of stuff, Apache, NFS, Samba, etc and as a 
firewall. Tried 4 MB RAM but no-go. Probably could have made it work at 4MB but 
back then I didn't know about turning down the minimum # servers for Apache (I 
think httpd's were chewing up all the mem so swap was thrashing). It's amazing 
what you can do if you forego a GUI. A 12MB 486 should be fine for 
experimentation.