For those of you who lived through it, how was the last .com crash?

So many startups went under at the same time that our liquidation firm combined the bankruptcy sale for our startup with that of another in our building at the same time into one auction.

I think it was worse. No one needed the internet back then, but now it is integrated into everything, so the whole internet cannot be dismissed as superfluous as it was then.

However, do note that there seem to have been no jobs at all in the field for a few years. I doubt that will happen again, but it did happen.

While many of us saw it coming, the crash was still a big shock. Startups falling like dominoes, confusion, stress, and uncertainty.

The biggest memory, for me at least, was the number of layoffs/redundancies in my circle. More than a few people I know were out of work for months, some for almost a year. A few were lucky - a woman I knew started a new job just as her severance payment ran out. Others moved away from working in tech.

Lots of Aeron chairs, Sun workstations and servers could be picked up for pennies in the dollar from the various liquidation auctions. With cheap equipment and lots of smart people looking for work, several businesses got their start in the aftermath.

For a while I worked for a systems integration firm. Their playbook was to buy surplus servers, pull RAM, disks from some to build even beefier servers and sell them at a discount on new prices. Used the remaining parts for spares as required. By servers I mean Sun, HP and IBM systems selling for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands $ each.

When my co-workers and I went out for lunch they stopped talking about stocks all the time.