That's not quite correct. The first (public) brute-forcing of DES was done in 1997 by the DESCHALL project distributing the search across tens of thousands of volunteer's computers for weeks [1]. The EFF then spent $250,000 to build a dedicated DES cracker ("Deep Crack") which required an average of four days per key found [2]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESCHALL_Project

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker