You had a celeron, sounds like you were spoiled. :P I had my dads old 486 to play with POV-ray on. I remember getting up at 5 am to work on a scene and come back from school to see if it had rendered right. Do homework tweak and hit render just before bed. If I was lucky I'd finish something cool once a month or so.
I started with POVray on a 486... then I had a big animation to do, so I wrote a primitive filesystem-based job scheduler. I used 13 office computers (P60 or P66) working in parallel to get a 30-second animation done in only a weekend. I think it was about 2 hours rendering/frame.
