I imagine the only real thing at play here is the number of connections the server software is configured to handle. This site has a small handful of small stat

I imagine the only real thing at play here is the number of connections the server software is configured to handle. This site has a small handful of small static assets: there's no server-side render, and I'd put money on everything being cached even if no such server-side optimizations have been made (done at the disk and/or OS level). I'd bet the only limiting factor of '96 hardware would be the NIC, all else being equal. Webserver software was a lot less complicated back then, so its memory footprint was far smaller.