Of all my hilariously low-end setups, my favorite would have to be the Zipit Z2. It's a little handheld instant-messaging toy with a qwerty keyboard, a 320x240

Of all my hilariously low-end setups, my favorite would have to be the Zipit Z2. It's a little handheld instant-messaging toy with a qwerty keyboard, a 320x240 screen, and 32 megabytes of RAM. In 2011 or so, I didn't have a laptop or much money, and I ended up using one of these as my daily driver. In those days, 32 megabytes would run stock Debian. X11 was practically useless on a device with no mouse, but all the curses programs worked. I had pretty good eyes, so I loaded a 4x6 console font and got myself a (tiny) 80 column terminal. Elinks was a mite heavy for the thing and also has a tendency to lock up when a page is slow, but I discovered an obscure console browser called 'retawq' that would support my 100-tabs-a-day habit, even in such a constrained environment. I even compiled it on the device. mplayer ran perfectly well, and the audio chip in it was actually absurdly good especially for an IM toy, so it was actually quite a practical mp3/FLAC player as well, at a time when a portable FLAC player would run you about £200 if you could find one at all. Disk space was limited only by the miniSD card you put in it. They aren't quite so much fun any more, sadly, as Debian no longer runs properly on 32 megabytes of RAM.