Back in the day, Titleist was a small company making some pretty sweet clubs for a select group of people. As Tiger became famous, the popularity of whatever sort of clubs he would play fueled the resurgence of the forged blades back into the golfers arsenal. Of course, this is strictly my opinion, although it's what happened to me.
When I was playing in high school I wanted to get a set of Titleist blades. The only catch? They didn't sell them to the general public. Hummmmm.... EBAY! I went online and looked around for months before I found a nice set, in good condition, at a reasonable price. Around that time, I believe they had a similar set, that was new, from Japan. But it carried a price tag close to 1k. And I couldn't afford that. Instead of getting a new set of Mizuno MP-29s, which are very nice, I decided to go with the very same clubs you see below.
Notice the way the "e" is written in the back of the club head. It's capitalized!
I have to pay homage to these clubs, as they saw me break par for the first time. Sadly, when I went to re-shaft them to fit my tall stature, the swing weight increased dramatically to something like an E4 (normal is D2 or something around there). So I had to give them up, and get the 990s.