I was on the inside of the dot com crash, Stryke. Unix and Windows systems administration in internet server farms is my stock in trade. I'm not good for much else.
The bubble started to inflate before I got out of the Navy and pretty much hit its critical point in 1998. That's when VCs were willing to put up money for monitor-brightness-tuning-over-TCPIP and other such stupidity. Here in Research Triangle Park, we got to watch as company after company was started, got over funded, proceeded to hemmorhage money, and finally disappeared. We didn't have it as bad as Silicon Vallley though. Our local economy isn't entirely hard tech based. Pretty soon the VCs wised up and you actually had to show you had a product before you could get money. That was the beginning of the end. Around the middle of 1999, VCs started demanding immediate ROI, and when none was forth coming, started bringing in the lawyers. Add millennial stupidity on top of it, and it was an orgy of stupidity. Dot coms crashed and burned left and right.
Overnight, my field went from commanding $120k/yr to being lucking to get $60k (usually more like $30k-45k). Tech support people got really screwed, going from a $18/hr job to a $8.
It could have been worse though. The tech bubble could have vomited over the entire economy and taken more industries with it. It was all over before the 2001 election and its been pretty much stable ever since.
Mind you, the numbers I quote above are for my area. They're higher in Silicon Valley.