Back in 1999, me and two roommates ran ipchains, Samba and an FTP server on an old PC, it had a 120MHz Pentium and 32MB of RAM. The only reason it didn't run more service was: What services would that even be?
Looks like we did similar things in the similar time frames. I was doing live broadcasting over a simple webcam over Apache, for example.
I think you can still run modern versions of these software on that hardware, albeit with a bit lower performance due to all added features. Kernel would require a bit more resources, too, possibly.
The biggest problem on the OrangePi Zero was to run SSH at full speed, due to required encryption/decryption on the fly. DNSMasq and VSFTPD were essentially invisible, qBittorrent requiring 85MB of RAM to handle all the state data.
While the applications are tied down with cgroups to prevent pushing each other to the reaper of OOMKiller, none of the applications have died because of insufficient memory, which is telling, in a good way.
It shows that my point still stands. Basic functionality on a software is very cheap, but when you add cryptography, or a couple of compute-intensive features, the old hardware breaks down instantly. It's of course possible to optimize these up to a point, but dedicated cryptography accelerators and other instruction sets are really helpful.
Took up a lot more space than a stamp though.