Back between 2000-2002 I decided to acquire all the machines I had drooled over in the 90's, so I purchased Alphaservers, Ultrasparcs, RS/6000s, PA-RISCs, SGIs,

Back between 2000-2002 I decided to acquire all the machines I had drooled over in the 90's, so I purchased Alphaservers, Ultrasparcs, RS/6000s, PA-RISCs, SGIs, and others. I was getting non-trivial configurations, usually quad CPUs, lots of memory, multiple NICs, and I was getting these things for anywhere from $20 for an Ultra1 to $200 (top price I paid) for a quad CPU Ultra Enterprise 450. That same machine is on eBay now for around $2000. There was definitely a time between early eBay hitting a critical mass of sellers and eBay getting saturated with professionals and robots, when the deals COULD BE incredible. You still needed to suss them out, but they were a regular occurrence