[amatecha]

Yeah, I ran a phpbb forum (alongside my normal static site) on a 486 in 2003 or so. It worked. It was slow, but it worked just fine for my friends and I! I remember it took multiple minutes to generate the SSH server key after the initial install lol

[mercutio2]

A 486 in 2003? Pentiums were shipping by the mid-90s, did you just have super old hardware lying around?

I retired my 486 in ‘95 or thereabouts…

[ssl-3]

In the mid-90s, I retired my 486 hardware and brought it over to a local ISP that we were friends with.

It had a second life doing stuff like delivering mail, handling IRC, serving web pages, and whatever else a few of us wanted from it. The performance was fine.

(The Pentium-ish machines stayed on desktop duty where GUIs devoured resources.)

[amatecha]

Yeah, I was actually running it on a 386 at first. In those days I didn't have much money and I just dumpster-dived computer hardware that was thrown out behind computer shops. Back before recycling stuff got regulated, PC repair shops threw out totally-working hardware all the time. Every piece of hardware of the web server was free, including the monochrome CRT monitor I had hooked up to it, and the awesome IBM Model M keyboard. The best dumpster find ever was a working Pentium 4 machine, all they took out of it was the HDD! Good times :)