If x and y were primes then your secret was probably quite valuable at that time. 25 years ago is about the right time for RSA encryption to still be state of the art at the NSA and whatnot. The reason this is valuable is that you can multiply the two numbers quickly, but figuring out the two numbers knowing only the product is extremely hard (mathematically/computationally). When x and y are large primes, then the division takes a long time (decades depending on the size of the number).

Is it possible that you actually learned some important private cryptographic key? If so, that number might have been sexy but you just didn’t actually have visibility into a bigger picture?