You have to remember from 97 to 2001 we were doubling CPU speed about every year. from 233mhz or so to 1ghz rapidly. I remember getting Pentium 2 boxes at 200, then 333, then 400, p3 at 500 and it felt like a year later 700mhz onward to 1ghz.

add to that ram prices were dropping rapidly and PC cost too I believe so it's plausible you could easily find second hand machines from business or families upgrading - as a kid I got a bunch of $25 computers to build my first home lab with shortly after this time and ran Linux routing since before we had the gem of a wrt54g most routers were crap.

First Pentium II was released in the middle of 1997. By 1997 the first Pentiums were some 4x outclocked by later Pentiums, but probably not more than 2x slower in real world applications, by no means an obsolete machine. My ~1996 P75 lasted me till about 2002, fun times.

Exactly. So the idea of reusing an old Pentium as a cheap router in the late 90s is plausible.

The entire machine would be still worth hundreds of dollars! Hundreds!

No. Nobody wanted Pentiums from the mid nineties by the end of the decade. Clock frequencies were racing to jump over the 1 GHz barrier.

We produced a lot of electronics trash in the 90s. You bought a computer and two years later you had to replace it. Upgrade paths were also severely limited due to new sockets and chipsets all the time.

It was stressful if you wanted to stay cutting edge with your gaming PC I can tell you.

Yes, and i586 to i686 was a big generational thing. As was 386 and 486 jumps before. The old generations fell to undesirable category pretty fast. Not so much with Pii to Piii and the few following years.

Those were often easy to get and repurpose into servers and gateways for things.

Bad times.

Cutting edge gaming still is, Mom's email/browsing/spreadsheets was and still is fine on a 5 year old machine.