I learned about the prevalence of Pareto distributions in computer systems from Harchol-Balter's Performance Modeling and Design of Computer Systems[0] (which, I will admit, I properly understood perhaps 25% of).

She reported the Pareto distribution of process times from first data collected in 1997[1].

[0] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/PerformanceModeling/book.htm...

[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/Papers/TOCS.pdf