Yes, but it was as slow as molasses flowing in January. You could also do the same on an old IBM XT. But, almost nobody did, because it was so slow. The computer was constantly swapping in and out memory to disk.

Oh, and the SSD is not the equivelant of RAM, it is much more like using the floppy disks, only much bigger. But that's just 20 years of Moores Law.