COPACOBANA
A low-cost FPGA machine that showed DES keys could be searched with off-the-shelf hardware.
Built in 2006 at Ruhr University Bochum, COPACOBANA linked a large number of inexpensive FPGA chips into one system. The hardware cost was around 10,000 dollars, and it could work through the entire DES key space in about a week.
It followed EFF's Deep Crack from 1998, which cracked DES in about two days for a quarter of a million dollars. Neither machine was really about DES, which was already on its way out. The point was that brute force had moved from a state-level budget question to something a university lab could afford.