If you wanted funding during the Dot Com boom, you needed to be running Sun Slowlaris on a SPARC-based machine. Valley VCs thought that PC-based UN*X was bad. I joined a data center start-up, replacing a CTO who insisted on spending big on Sun, and converted us to a Linux shop. We could then afford to pump all our money into Cisco Systems routers! Some suckers bought the company.
Running Sun Ultras or SPARCstations was very expensive, and ran into all sorts of problems. The pace of new software development in the Linux environment eventually killed everything else. Watching people try to get "web commerce" packages working in Slowlaris was comical.
Now SGI, that was funny.
