Comment by MarkusWandel

Well, all those years ago, my testbed for installing and trying out FreeBSD was a 486 with 8MB of memory. That was a heck of a machine compared to the ones BSD grew up on, and it ran great. No GUI on that setup of course, but all the Unixy stuff... vi editor, C toolchain, NFS etc.

I don't know what's the minimum system to run no-GUI mainline Linux on these days. I'm sure BSD has gotten bloated too, but I'll bet not as much.