Here are some ideas:

1) Scavenge an old PC from a tag sale, estate sale, thrift store, or eBay. Or see if there's one sitting by the dumpster. A PC from 2004 or so should do nicely.

2) That ThinkPad may have a serial port. Connect it to a PC through a USB-to-serial dongle. If the newer PC runs Linux, you can run PPP or SLIP on it to turn that serial connection into a network connection. For bonus authenticity points, it will communicate at mid-90s consumer internet speeds!

> The biggest problem in this challenge would be the web, I suppose, as a recent web browser that supports Javascript and all that will easily use more than 1GB of RAM just by itself.

You'd be surprised, I've found that 1GB devices are still quite usable on the 'modern' web by adding some swap space and not having too many tabs. Of course that's approaching the lower bound of usefulness these days.

- Install ZRAM on your Linux distro

- Ublock Origin is a must. If not: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts. Clone it, backup /etc/hosts, append the content of the /hosts subfiles MINUS the localhost and ::1 lines.

- Use a bare window manager, not a DE. Cwm, icewm, doesn't matter. Use lxappearance to set up your gtk theme to something you like.

That atom powered Eeebox was great. It worked in bright sunlight, super portable and light. I used it as a field mapping unit, with a GPS plugged into it, and off line maps. When in WiFi space I could download maps etc. ( I used Ozzie Explorer to digitise paper scanned maps and as GPS interface.) It worked until 2018 when unfortunately... broke the screen.

You're thinking of the EeePC, the Netbook (I happen to own one as well, still working). The EeeBox was a desktop PC, although I think internally it used pretty much the same hardware.

You're right!

Eeepc 901.

Great little machine :)

I added a 64GB drive to mine, increased the RAM to the max supported (2GB? 4GB?) and used it for years with Debian, after running it as a hackintosh for a while.

I am using Asus netbook with 1GB RAM, 32GB SSD (and vanilla Ubuntu) quite regularly, and use it to write Haskell programs. Frankly the small disk is more of a concern, but I have to be mindful of memory also. If I run Firefox, Emacs and GHC together, there is a high chance that I run out of memory (and more likely than not, Linux OOM will kill a wrong process after a 20-minute system freeze).

(I wish I could get rid of Firefox from the three, but I need to look up documentation for whatever language I use, usually Haskell, and eww is not a replacement, because it's not multithreaded, Emacs freezes when it needs to format a web page.)

In any case, in early 00s, I was using a 486 machine with 12 MB of RAM with Linux. It was spartan but writing Latex (I think I was using Jed and twm at the time) was possible on it.

> (I wish I could get rid of Firefox from the three, but I need to look up documentation for whatever language I use, usually Haskell,

Lynx, Links, Elinks, W3M, Netsurf, Dillo HG from mercurial (openssl-dev, fltk-dev and mbedtls-devel as dependencies, I can help with a custom build in a breeze).