Lower stakes, but ~15 years ago a friend had a Linux box in the corner that had huge uptime. I want to say the uptime started shortly after the kernel patch that fixed the 400-ish day overflow of the uptime counter. He moved to a new home and very carefully moved the running server using it's UPS. He didn't have to worry about keeping networking up though.
I used to be all about long uptimes. I eventually started seeing long uptimes as a negative though. A long uptime probably means patches have not been applied.
I also did that once, about the same timeframe, specifically to preserve an uptime.
I think the cult of runtime came about simply because it was impressive that a personal computer could stay running for more than a few days when most of the world ran Win95. And because development cycles were longer and there weren't a lot of network threats.
I used to be all about long uptimes. I eventually started seeing long uptimes as a negative though. A long uptime probably means patches have not been applied.