> Seeing someone's recent post about a 3Mb 386 machine has

This is almost hopeless.  Just one more Mb memory to 4Mb would
help, but really impossible as a user machine.  For a dedicated
ipf/nat machine, might be okay if light load.

> My immediate reaction was to wonder if I could install a
> very minimal BSD on the 170Mb and use the 40Mb for swap
> space.

170Mb and 40Mb will work nicely.

I still use early 486 notebooks with 120Mb total disk space for
serial consoles and the like.  Only install kern, base, etc, misc
and text.  Build a custom kernel on another machine (no need to
move disks around, just ftp it or copy from a floppy).  To build
a custom kernel on the machine itself, you can just barely do it
in 320Mb.

henry nelson