Hey, I thought I had it pretty bad:
Pentium (the original) 200, 32 megs ram
But I heard from a friend that he was running it on something even worse. So I’m wondering:
Just how bad a machine have you run Blender on?
mmm, my faithful p-120 32Mb ram laptop
put 2.27 on there and couldn’t decide if radiosity or class was less interesting.
(it runs windows 95, and has a 1gb hd)
Hmmm… if i get my really old 486 with 16 ram and windows 95 running i will tell you… (as far as i know, windows 95 doesn’t display the Blender icon for the executable…:O… hehehe)
The slowest I’ve ever used is a PII 450 with 128 MB RAM. I used to have a much older machine that could’ve probably run Blender, but it would’ve been so ridiculously slow that it would’ve been practically useless.
Just for the record, my first Blender Station was a Pentiun (the original P) at 90 Hz. with 64 Mb ram and 3 GB HD… it was such a hot machine when I got it!!!
NOTE: I used to run TrueSpace 1.0 a lot on that machine also 
For a long time I runed a P-166 MHz, 64 MB of RAM and a 4 MB nVidia card with a 1.2 GB hard drive (and Win 98).
Martin
my first blender-box was a 300mhz pII with win 98 on it, ~350megs RAM 4gb + 18gb HD’s.
@rwv01
yes this was a great surprise :D. it works fine on a 200/400mhz cpu 
my problem in running blender was alwys the graficboard. this laptop here has a xp1800+, 256sdram… and a atirage chip its impossible working on blender here. thought i’d work.
woah… and I thought my pIII 500, 64 megs was bad…
Before I upgraded my machine, I was running Blender on a P-90 with 64 MB of RAM, and all of 800 MB of disk space. I don’t even remember what kind of video card it has.
I started using Blender on a Pentium 200 Mhz, with 64 MB EDO RAM, and a 2 MB graphics card, plus a 3.2 HDD. That was back in the good ol’ C-key days…
i thought mine was a POS, but i guess i should feel so lucky…
(260 gig)
(dont you mean ran??) haha
no, I meant ruined
Martin
first time I used blender was on a pentium 133 with 16mb ram
It’s more the video card than the processor and ram, though those are kinda big parts. I ran it on my dad’s work laptop which was a pentium 3 500 mhz and 128 megs of ram with like a 2 mb vid card and it ran like crap, i couldn’t do anything but planes. A cube slowed it down SO much. BUt i ran it on the same kind of machine with a 16 mb video card and i could run it fine.
Pooba
I am currently running blender on a Pentium I 166MHz with 32 megs of ram and 1 meg video memory 
. When I started with blender (then version 1.8 ), the machine only had 16 megs. It runs Win95 with a 3.2 gig HD. I have used blender on faster machines, and am amazed at how well it runs on my machine. The big difference is in the openGL user interface. The refresh rate is quite slow, the mouse kind of jumps when manipulating objects. But the renders don’t take significantly longer than a faster machine, even with fancy stuff like subsurfs, envmaps, particles (>1/2 the speed of a 900MHz machine). The more stuff in a scene, the slower the interface goes, I just compensate by turning off subsurfs and limiting my use of shaded view in the interface.
So, if anybody has an old ~400MHz machine that they would like to send me, just let me know.
The first machine I ran Blender on was a Pentium 120, 16mb of ram, 4 mb video card, and windows 98. I do have a 486 I could try it out on though…hmmm…
Ran surprisingly well on my first computer, PentI 133mhz, 32mb RAM, and onboard video. Good enough to design a desktop image. Wouldn’t want to do any extensive animation on it.
when I first used blender we were so poor we didn’t have any clothes to wear, and we used to live in a gutter… my father worked hard in the coal mines and bought me vic-20, (1.0227 Mhz, 5 KB ram, 184 x 176 gfx mode, 8-16 colors)…
at nights, I used to run blender on my precious VIC-20, just that the glow of tv screen would keep the wolves away from us… and I would model some food and the whole family would gather around it and drool… I remember, my father tapping me on the shoulder and whispering to my ear one evening: “son, someday you will work at pixar, and we can get some real food…”
.b