I made the mistake of hitting from stage 1 an `emerge world` on a Pentium 3 (I think? P4 at the very best) with a full Open Office and Firefox selection.
No idea how long it would take.
One week later I finally saw my new desktop!
I learnt a hell of a lot with Gentoo - only had a dvd and the magazine it came with stepping through the stage 1 install process. No internet connection to search for answers when things went wrong. Not my current daily driver but definitely some good memories!