[icedchai]

Linux in the 90's wasn't as bloated as it was now. It definitely took well under an hour to compile a kernel. My first Linux box was a 386SX-16. I later upgraded to a 486DX4-100.

[ce4]

That doesn't sound right, it's still not bloated. The majority is drivers then comes the cpu arch folder that takes a big cut. You can check yourself with cloc:

http://cloc.sourceforge.net/

[icedchai]

Linux 1.0 was 1 meg, gzipped and less than 200K lines of code, total.

Linux 4.x is over 150 megs, gzipped. Just the lines in the arch/x86 folder are more than the total lines in Linux 1.0.