Code size is correspondingly small. And it has features that nobody else has produced, even though active development of it ceased five years ago. The big lesson is that modern Linux distributions can no longer claim to run on minimal hardware. Yeah, you can boot the kernel and do some other things, but a productive desktop running X isn't part of the equation.
Slowness delayed is still slowness.
You can't get DeScribe at all. The applications that exist are pretty much all there will be, and many of the best of them are difficult to find if you can get them at all. The spec sheet for the new Caldera workstation beta says it requires a Pentium II or better. The code has gotten big and slow not because it needs to but because it can. Dive into the junkyard for hardware, and you'll need to get your software there, too.