Seventeen years ago! I bought this multi-million dollar hoard of Sun servers from a scrap yard for $300. After testing, fixing, and swapping parts to max out some of them, I traded a couple for an SGI Onyx for the museum, a few more for parts of what eventually became my personal 16-proc Origin-2000, and kept two as compute servers for my film making.
(A maxxed-out E4000 has 14 x 400 Mhz UltraSparc II's, and 14 gig of ram (In 128meg sticks! Ha ha ha. Warm.)).
