Back in the day I had W2K Pro running (very slowly) on a 66MHz 486. XP was only 18 months or so behind that, and the system requirements probably weren't much different. Wouldn't wanted to have to use it for anything though.
I did some Java development on windows NT 3.51 and a 486 (33Mhz?) back in 1996. Worked fine. That was considered a fast machine at the time. I used Ultraedit and IBM's jikes incremental compiler. We were building some applet. Builds took a few seconds with jikes (as opposed to using javac that came with the jdk). There were no ant, maven, or gradle wasting more time. I had a little batch file that set up the classpath just right and then called the compiler.
That setup was actually faster than building kotlin projects on my current mac M1 laptop. Of course it's doing more stuff these days but build times seem a constant through the ages. Better hardware just leads to more complicated tooling.
Something is wrong with your story, possibly the year (or you lived in a poor place). The 486 DX33 was released in 1990 and was lower midrange in 1994. In 1996, it was more or less outdated. I had that problem, a slow 486 in 1996 ;)
I had a 33MHz 386 in 1998 while my friends were playing quake on their early pentiums. It was hard to get DOS games at that time, being stuck on civI and wolfenstein…
Basically free, my first upgrade a year or two earlier was a 486DX2-66 CPU + board "acquired" from an open container in front of a recycling operation.
I think it's the difference between getting stabbed and shot. Not a lot of love for either. But I can work with both and gradle seems less hassle these days. Especially if you are doing Kotlin.
https://twitter.com/AnachronistJohn/status/15759679703915601...
I've been curious about whether Windows XP or newer could be finagled to run on an i80486 or equivalent. I bet this NTDEV person would know!