27 lines
3.7 KiB
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27 lines
3.7 KiB
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="no"?>
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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>IBM</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="../../jargon.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.0"/><link rel="home" href="../index.html" title="The Jargon File"/><link rel="up" href="../I.html" title="I"/><link rel="previous" href="IANAL.html" title="IANAL"/><link rel="next" href="ICBM-address.html" title="ICBM address"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">IBM</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="IANAL.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">I</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="ICBM-address.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><dt><a id="IBM"/><dt xmlns="" id="IBM"><b>IBM</b>: <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="pronunciation">/I·B·M/</span></dt></dt><dd><p> Once upon a time, the computer company most hackers loved to hate;
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today, the one they are most puzzled to find themselves liking.</p><p>From hackerdom's beginnings in the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, IBM
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was regarded with active loathing. Common expansions of the corporate name
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included: Inferior But Marketable; It's Better Manually; Insidious Black
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Magic; It's Been Malfunctioning; Incontinent Bowel Movement; and a
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near-<a href="infinite.html"><i class="glossterm">infinite</i></a> number of even less complimentary
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expansions (see also <a href="../F/fear-and-loathing.html"><i class="glossterm">fear and loathing</i></a>). What
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galled hackers about most IBM machines above the PC level wasn't so much
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that they were underpowered and overpriced (though that counted against
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them), but that the designs were incredibly archaic,
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<a href="../C/crufty.html"><i class="glossterm">crufty</i></a>, and <a href="../E/elephantine.html"><i class="glossterm">elephantine</i></a>
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... and you couldn't <span class="emphasis"><em>fix</em></span> them — source
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code was locked up tight, and programming tools were expensive, hard to
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find, and bletcherous to use once you had found them.</p><p>We didn't know how good we had it back then. In the 1980s IBM had
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its own troubles with Microsoft and lost its strategic way, receding from
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the hacker community's view. Then, in the 1990s, Microsoft became more
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noxious and omnipresent than IBM had ever been.</p><p>In the late 1990s IBM re-invented itself as a services company, began
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to release open-source software through its AlphaWorks group, and began
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shipping <a href="../L/Linux.html"><i class="glossterm">Linux</i></a> systems and building ties to the
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Linux community. To the astonishment of all parties, IBM emerged as a
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staunch friend of the hacker community and
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<a href="../O/open-source.html"><i class="glossterm">open source</i></a> development, with ironic consequences
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noted in the <a href="../F/FUD.html"><i class="glossterm">FUD</i></a> entry.</p><p>This lexicon includes a number of entries attributed to
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‘IBM’; these derive from some rampantly unofficial jargon lists
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circulated within IBM's formerly beleaguered hacker underground.</p></dd><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="IANAL.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="../I.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="ICBM-address.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">IANAL </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="../index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> ICBM address</td></tr></table></div></body></html>
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