[ezst]

Did my whole engineering curriculum as my single computer, ran MATLAB and other JVM GUIs/IDEs on 1GB RAM/Atom N450. The build and display were horrendous, but that was a good companion to take notes during lectures and in the lab.

[embedding-shape]

Similarly, I was hacking on a tiny netbook before I was a professional programmer, everything about it was awful, the keyboard was Norwegian and it was missing some keys, but eventually I managed to build up enough of a portfolio with it that I got my first internship and eventually got hired. Old photo (2013) of it, running Kubuntu (Xubuntu maybe even?) at this point I think: https://i.imgur.com/1NRIZrg.jpeg

[ezst]

Haha, same vibe! Mine was running mandrake/mandriva + kde. Also programming on such a low specced device gave a superpower (and good coding hygiene): you would immediately spot memleaks and inefficient code because you would feel it as entire seconds of slowness and unresponsiveness. Like, none of my GUI apps had work happening on the event thread, but I could immediately tell which ones would.

[ramgine]

Unrelated to your post (I missed those form factors) but has imgur become enshittified too? If I try to zoom in on your picture it gives me a popup I can’t clear telling me to install the app. Sad.