[anthk]

Running X with 8MB of RAM? Emacs perfectly ran on TTY's, and for web browser Lynx worked. Images? You would get a SVGAlib viewer.

With 16MB of RAM, and FVWM and RXvt (xvt before) ran circles around a Sparc with CDE and DTTerm/Xterm.

[cmrdporcupine]

Yeah mostly I did what you said (terminal emacs, lynx/gopher). There did come an era (late 94, 95) before I could afford to upgrade to e.g. Pentium or higher class machine but after which it was important to be able to run e.g. Netscape to Do Things For the Real World.