alt Hacker NewsLater in 2003, when I joined CERN, there were still Sun workstations being used, and I was an earlier user of Scientific Linux in 2004.
Afterwards Nokia Networks were still deploying into HP-UX, and the first big Linux project started around late 2005, to Red-Hat.
I worked at smaller companies that were more risk tolerant. At an earlier startup (late 90's), all the developers ran RedHat on Dells, but the actual production environment was Solaris. I remember going out to a customer site and deploying some massive Sun Enterprise setup. It probably cost a half million USD for the whole configuration. Multiple servers (Enterprise 450 and 250 I think, two of each), multiple storage boxes (StorEdge), Veritas filesystem software, some other Veritas HA system, several Cisco switches, some firewall brand that I forget. All this was connected to a fractional T1 (512kbit.) It never went live due to some contractual issue. All that money wasted.