My 256MB RAM, 900Mhz Duron machine (single core, naturally) in ~2002 (IIRC?) could do just about everything my modern one can. We even had video chat! It was just much lower res. The limiting factor in online stuff was, by far, connection speed, not the power of my hardware. That was about the point where the hardware was fast enough and had enough memory that I could multitask in a modern way without hitting problems like popping/stuttering audio or bad swap issues. Aside from legitimate increases in memory use for higher-res media, most everything since then, from my perspective, has been pure bloat. Why does 16x that memory and two cores at double the clock feel insufficient for extremely similar workloads and software feature-sets? Fucking bloat is why. Largely, but far from solely, web-tech infesting everything.

Before that, my 64MB RAM 100mhz Pentium could usually have a couple things open before it'd hit swap too badly. I'm talking like Word and a web browser, not calc and notepad. None of the equivalent programs to those can even open all on their own in a footprint smaller than 64MB these days, let alone with other programs and the OS in the same space. Hell, how many operating systems fit in that with a GUI as capable and usable as, say, Win98se (let alone something really incredible on the performance front, like BeOS)?