We did work with Jabber/Email and 512MB/1GB of RAM running similar chat clients, desktop environments (XFCE 4.6 was much faster than 4.16), video players and office suites.

Nowadays to do the same today you need 10X the resources just for a chat application.

And by 'chat' I don't mean 'irc'. Jabber, embedded Youtube URL's, inline LaTeX documents...