I lived without X for 4 years, between 2005 and 2009, my main box was a 500Mhz Coppermine Pentium 3 with 128mb of ram and an integrated SiS 630 video card, a cr

I lived without X for 4 years, between 2005 and 2009, my main box was a 500Mhz Coppermine Pentium 3 with 128mb of ram and an integrated SiS 630 video card, a crappy setup that taught me much about computers and unixes. The applications that I used included vim for text and coding, midnight commander and some ol' school unix tools to manage my files, mutt for e-mail, links2 for browsing, mplayer with frame buffer or vesa output for video, mocp for audio, a combination of pdftohtml and fbgs (included in fbida) to see pdfs, fbida for images and irssi to hang around in freenode. I also learned to play angband (a roguelike that's far better than nethack) and began to use zsh. gpm was a must to some copy and paste. I now have a Macbook, but still use some of these applications everyday.