I used a Pentium 4 (2.8 ghz) w/ 1 gb ram and (sadly) AGP until 2011 as my main machine. Now, I can't say I've been terribly interested in any "new" games after, say, Half-Life 2, but the horrendous post-2008 trends in web design drove me nuts. While it seems like most commercial websites are designed for total morons now, somehow they still end up being even more confusing and counter-intuitive. Part of this bad design is the BLOAT and dependence on scripts, flash, etc. My Pentium 4 had a rough time with full-screen HD videos in a web browser.
But aside from the resource demands of the awful modern web, most of any standard native-code application would work fine on technology going back pretty far. Can you believe that the system requirements for MS Office 2010 are a Pentium 3 500 MHz with 256 MB ram? Yeah - when it comes to "old fashioned" applications like this, we don't need eight cores, let alone 8 GB of ram!
Obviously the art and magic of code optimization is long over (good examples: the source code for any old id software game!) and I believe what happens is that once our systems got (what I consider to be) overpowered for the average computer tasks - I estimate this happened around the Core2 era - it gives developers the green light to abandon any efforts of optimization. Welcome to post-2008 computing - BLOAT BLOAT BLOAT. Where your web browser carves out 500 MB of memory to sit there and do nothing. (Correct me if this is not a valid complaint...?)
On the topic of optimization, I believe the final frontier here is optimizing for network bandwidth. 20 years ago just moving data six inches from one side of your motherboard to the other was on an exciting upward climb in speed... nowadays that frontier is getting that data to go six thousand miles. Someday I believe even network bandwidth will no longer be an issue, at which point developers will no longer care about network code optimization either.
- AMD 386 DX/40, 8mb, DOS 6.22 / WFW
- 486 DX2/66, 16mb, DOS 6.22 / WFW
- 486 DX4/100, 16mb, Win98se
- Pentium 166, 32mb, DOS 6.22 / WFW
- Pentium Pro 200, 64mb, Win98
- Athlon 500 MHz, 192mb, Win98