Yeah it was a crazy time to watch the whole bottom of the workstation market fall out. Solaris managed to hold on in datacentres for a while, but the others not as much. And a 486 or Pentium running Linux was just as good as most proprietary Unix at the time, or was well on its way to getting there.
I did a summer contract job at an IBM subsidiary in summer 98 or so, and I had a manager there fight me on installing Linux on some spare PCs, because he thought they should be running, y'know, SCO. A Real Unix. It already looked preposterous by then.
One of those SUN pizza boxes held out so long that the bearings on the drives were completely worn out, everything was moved onto a different machine and when it was powered down you could hear the harddrives have a most horrible crash. The drives would not even spin when powered up again.
I did a summer contract job at an IBM subsidiary in summer 98 or so, and I had a manager there fight me on installing Linux on some spare PCs, because he thought they should be running, y'know, SCO. A Real Unix. It already looked preposterous by then.