I know 10.2 is already out, but I thought I'd be a bit experimental and try something old out and see how it performs on my computers. Perhaps it might even handle my relatively newer hardware, who knows?

Anyone still using 8.1 now? If yes, please share your story.

2 weeks ago I was cleaning out one of my closets and came across 2 hard drives in anti static bags and they were taped together........I even labled them (master,slave)........So I put them in a spare box and booted up with a grub floppy.........lo and behold Slackware 8.1 was still on the Master, and the Slave had 3 gigs of Ebooks I had downloaded and forgot about...........KDE was very nice back then, KDE 3.01 was not a memory hogging eye candy filled bloatware like it is now.......I'm totally serious.......install slack 8.1 and compare what KDE
has become to what it was back then and you'll see what I'm talking about.........LOL

coolness! a fast KDE is something i definitely want to see. I am downloading the iso now.

Out of interest, did that computer have USB 2.0 ports on it, and did they work on 8.1? Did it respond to an ipod being plugged in?

hmm...
i've been installing for over half an hour now and it just finished installing elf libraries. Seems rather slow.

I am running a Thinkpad t23, Pentium III cpu, 512 MB RAM.

Is this slow installation normal for slackware 8.2?

Slackware 8.1 is quite a bit slower than 10, even on older hardware.

Gnome 1.4 and kde 3.0 are both heavier and slower than their 2.12 and 3.4 counterparts respectively.

The old X itself is also slower.

Slack-8.1 will handle most newer hardware -you can compile newer versions where necessary.
I think the old KDE is probably slower, but smaller.
Gnome 1.4 is STILL used for some great software like gnucash.
I really liked 8.1 and have a couple of distros based on it. For ease of installation you might try using my Amigo-1.0 and then extend it.
I used to miss GCC-2.95 sometimes since I compile lots of older code. I finally compiled gcc-2.95 for Slackware 10.1 to solve that problem, although running two compilers is a bit tricky, especially for compiling c++ progs.
I don't think you'll find much performance difference between 8.1 and later versions of Slackware, but the installation size can be smaller.

Gnome 1.4 was really slow. All i remember was that it takes 15 seconds to open nautilus opposed to the .25 it takes today in 2.12.

Although the older versions of galeon were nice.

just install 8.1 and recompile kernel for new features.