But you probably don't want to run GNOME or KDE. Or apps like the GIMP. Or Netscape 4.x.
I do all that on my PII-233 laptop w/32 MB all the time. Oh sure, not all at the same time, but they work. Actuall I run Gnome, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Postgres and Netscape 4.x all at the same time. Plus vi in a couple of terminal windows.