Cisco and Sun were the go-to big name equipment suppliers to many startups around the dot-com days. A lot of it was stupid expensive (like 150k for a sun server with the performance of a 5k Linux box, or 20k for a basic Cisco router). Well, when the startups folded a huge amount of that equipment got sold for pennies on the dollar and Cisco basically almost went bankrupt - and Sun basically did.
the glory days of just bonkers sun servers! as a young pup consultant fresh in the USA, i was lucky enough to help setup a fully loaded sun enterprise e10000, gigantic (for the time) external disk arrays and a room-sized storagetek powderhorn[0]. it was in dallas for an insurance company ~1997. all in-house apps, crunching credit card risk stuff i think? an interesting quirk is that they were an almost all-X11 shop! they had a really sweet custom CDE setup. not what you'd expect at that type of firm. would love to know what that e10k eventually sold for.
