An ESP32 can have 1 or 2 cores, running at 160+MHz. It has built in Wifi and Bluetooth, and usually 500KB and 4MB of Flash that programs can run out of.
IIRC, that compares reasonably well with a 486 or Pentium computer running a single application, especially when you realize it's not running a GUI. A decent amount of software of that era was inteprreted - that's when Javascript and Python first came into existence.
All those were used for tiny of functionality in browsers and did not even remotely approach the performance and functionality of the real desktop applications.
This makes no sense. I do not recall the amount of RAM I had on my 486DX50 but whatever version of office it had at the time ran just fine. JavaScript was not even born by then. But when first ever versions of JavaScript were released their execution speed were molasses comparatively to native applications. I know it first hand as I was developing native and web and in browser applications since 94 even before JavaScript (I used Netscape's server push functionality for that). When Java was released and until it matured to decent enough JIT it was the same slow resource hog (again know it first hand).
I do not quite understand what you're trying to say here. Many are / were not wealthy to buy any computer at all back then. I was born long before 486.
IIRC, that compares reasonably well with a 486 or Pentium computer running a single application, especially when you realize it's not running a GUI. A decent amount of software of that era was inteprreted - that's when Javascript and Python first came into existence.