I’ve been wondering if there was any Linux distribution that could revive this ancient hardware, at least for offline use.
That would be 32-bit I guess. (Looks like all Athlons before 2003 were 32-bit.)
So it should support Linux in principle, but these days the range of distros will be quite limited. antiX or Puppy maybe?
Alternative to keep the computer alive would be:
You might also interested to read about the maker of freedos:
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the problem with that machine and current os is ram, 256mbs of ram this days is nothing
minimum to do anything is now 2 gbs
i imagine that is ddr1 and find two 1 gb modules must be a challenge
the other problem is the motherboard, must be using electrolytic capacitors and after a quarter of century i doubt those are in good shape
having said that, puppy linux still has 32 bit versions it seems
Also antiX - says that 512Mb is the “recommended minimum” but also says it “should run” on 256Mb.
some time ago, i remember a youtube video experiment, someone trying to run some distro on like 32 mbs of ram, something like that, wasnt that nice of a experience
i cant find the video, but i found another of some guy running a weird distro on 24mbs of ram, it takes ages to load and loads to a shell
to have a gui, you need 128mbs of ram minimum and lots of luck it seems
weird that the single core and the 32 bits are not the problem here
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I guess the joy comes from the attempt and from not completely failing 
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Slackware appears to still have files going way back. That’s what I ran around that time frame.
Archive.org still holds some old ISOs from that time period as well:
Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine