[retrac]

For context, I currently have a 16 MHz 68030 machine with 24 MB running a recent NetBSD install, just as a lark.

For simple command line things like poking around the file system over telnet, it feels pretty much like a contemporary system. It can even run the Python REPL fine, though it takes a good number of seconds to start up. Apache is no problem and it can host a website, though I imagine it would crumple with more than a dozen requests a minute or so. Actually, the only real annoyance for that kind of work is that the machine's too slow to authenticate SSL keys in a reasonable time, so logging in takes forever and you can't host an HTTPS site.

Given this ARM machine is probably ~100x faster, if you're willing to add some swap for flexibility, I imagine it'd be usable for a wide variety of low-memory tasks.

[anthk]

> Actually, the only real annoyance for that kind of work is that the machine's too slow to authenticate SSL keys in a reasonable time, so logging in takes forever and you can't host an HTTPS site.

Isn't Dillo (compiled from Mercurial) with mbedtls fast enough? Also, Gopher servers like sdf.org, magical.fish or i-logout.cz would shine on that machine. Fire up lynx and go. Or better, compile sacc with tcc, it will run megafast.

[anthk]

Instead of python, try compiling both JimTCL and the SDL "widgets". You will like it.