Everyone in SV in 1999 used Sun boxes. Racking Ultra-2 Pizza Boxes was being very Internet Professional and money was flowing freely enough to pay for them.
Yep. I was at Netscape in Mountain View around that time, and the data center was mostly full of SGI stuff and Sun stuff. The new datacenter on Ellis opened up, the AOL thing happened, and even more Sun hardware started showing up. E4500s, E450s, you name it. I had an Ultra 5 sitting in my cube just because I could. And then the Intel stuff started showing up in droves. Compaq servers running Linux. And I don't remember seeing a single Sun box show up in that data center after that...
Sun hardware was everywhere in the late 90's / early 2000's. I remember working at a couple of startups that had E3500s (mini-fridge size machines?) and a few E450s. We had Ultra 5's and 10's on the developer desktops.
I have an Ultra 10 rotting away in my basement. It cost a pretty penny at the time, but I haven't booted it up in almost 15 years.