Those are big numbers especially for non-enterprise DBs in the 90s.

MySQL's big breakthrough(not specifically talking about perf) was innodb in 2010.

Just 15+ years ago Postgres had major issues with concurrency as we think about it today.

And just 10+ years ago a LOT of DB drivers weren't thread safe and had their own issues dealing with concurrency.

So nearly 30 years ago? Fuhgeddaboudit.