I agree with that. Certainly there were lottery winners who got in on the ground floor of ultimately very successful companies. And there were others who had disposable income who bought into companies like Yahoo early and got out in time.

But, in general, salaries were mostly unexceptional in tech even in Silicon Valley, a lot of companies went bust, and even most of the surviving firms--including the big systems/storage/chip/networking/etc. players--went through some very lean years with a bunch of layoffs.