I had a Pentium 1 laptop with 8MB of RAM in early 2000s (bought it for very cheap, my first laptop) running Slackware with Window Maker and Emacs :-)

Wmaker and Emacs? You did a custom kernel build right?

For being something to brag against, you used XEmacs, I guess. Or X-compiled Emacs, in order to be a "big" accomplishment. UXTerm+Emacs under the CLI was "big", but manageable; the X build (even the Athena or Lucid one) wasn't a light thing at all.