I was around during the dot-com bust, and this little piece of revisionist lore always irks me. Something called "Linux" existed in 1998-1999, but it is not the "Linux" you know today, and when stacked up against Solaris running on Sun hardware, it didn't really work. People wanted to run their entire back-end on a single system, and that single system pretty much had to be a Sun E10000 running Oracle, because nothing else could scale up as high. The LAMP-stack scale-out style of system-building had not been invented yet.
I agree with you that people liked scaling using a single big machine back then, and Sun had the biggest and best machines (and still does to some extent).
The problem is more that a ton of those people didn't actually need to scale.
