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
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…
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.)