Yeah, it was a different world. I worked at a company using X + Motif on SCO Unix back in the early 90s. I had a 386sx with 8mb ram + 6 MB on an ISA expansion card! When you changed a header file constant (like a label string) and had to recompile the ~1 MB(!) executable, it really was coffee break time - compile time was ~1 hour for a full rebuild. Strangely enough, our current project on a 16-core VM also takes nearly an hour for a full rebuild - but we have parallel build options that go much faster.

I also ran Linux+X11 on my 486 (for some grad work) with 32 MB, IIRC. ATI Mach32 graphics card, Nec 5FGe monitor (loved that one!), etc..