I was going to ask: "so how is it that the average non-commercial site can be expected to crash upon reaching ten HN upvotes but this 1996 is still chugging along strong" After all, this was well before such thing as CDNs were in wide use.
Then I looked at the source and saw that it's a Frontpage site.
* This brings back memories of when you could get at least $50/hr to make something like this.
The average non-commercial site these days is based on an unoptimized Wordpress installation that loads 137 PHP files and does 18 DB reqests to render its main page. This 1996 gem is entirely static content. That's a few orders of magnitude less work for the server to do right there. And it runs on IIS 7, so the the hardware and software that does the actual work is most definitely NOT from 1996.
> And it runs on IIS 7, so the the hardware and software that does the actual work is most definitely NOT from 1996.
And this is the big thing right here. We're running sites designed to be basically usable when served by 1996 hardware on systems orders of magnitude faster with almost two decades' worth of optimizations compared to what was acceptable in 1996. I don't know how much NTFS has changed since then, but filesystems in the Linux world have undergone a sea change in that timeframe, which is directly relevant to how quickly a static page can be served.
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.
Then I looked at the source and saw that it's a Frontpage site.
* This brings back memories of when you could get at least $50/hr to make something like this.