On the heels of the bright, new and shiny Slackware 14.1 release (of course, it works great -- as expected), what do I want to do now?

Surprisingly, go retro!

For the sake of discovering it roots and observing the evolutionary process, I want to explore the explore the earliest possible version of Slackware in a virtual machine. It looks like Slackware-8.1 from 2002 would be "old" enough yet "modern" enough for the platforms supported by QEMU.

Before I reinvent the wheel, has anyone else gone retro by firing a vintage, virtualized Slackware? If so, any recommendations for the CPU emulation, hardware choices and so on?

You lack ambition. This is real retro! http://www.nielshorn.net/slackware/slack_old.php
I haven't seen Niels post in this forum for a while, but I found this work to be very cool and the Slackware version documentation is very complete (but not quite up to date).