Ha, that's very close to my story as well. I had a 166Mhz Pentium and it was all PCI cards and 100mbit by then. That was essentially the start of my career.

Reminds me of a Pentium Pro router put into a datacenter, two 2GB mirrored scsi drives, two nics, happily running a hardened pfSense, ran with zero issues for the better part of a decade.

It just wouldn't die.

The suspicion was because the electricity going to it cleaner than average, in a datacenter, the normal wear and tear on electronics may have been reduced.

Respect was paid at it's decommissioning to convert it into a vm, knowing it's luck, chances are it would still boot up and keep on running.