28 lines
1.7 KiB
Plaintext
28 lines
1.7 KiB
Plaintext
IBM
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/IBM/ 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. From
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hackerdom's beginnings in the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, IBM was regarded
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with active loathing. Common expansions of the corporate name included:
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Inferior But Marketable; It's Better Manually; Insidious Black Magic; It's
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Been Malfunctioning; Incontinent Bowel Movement; and a near- infinite number
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of even less complimentary expansions (see also fear and loathing ). 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, crufty , and
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elephantine. .. and you couldn't fix them source code was locked up tight,
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and programming tools were expensive, hard to find, and bletcherous to use
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once you had found them. We didn't know how good we had it back then. In the
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1980s IBM had its own troubles with Microsoft and lost its strategic way,
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receding from the hacker community's view. Then, in the 1990s, Microsoft
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became more noxious and omnipresent than IBM had ever been. In the late
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1990s IBM re-invented itself as a services company, began to release
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open-source software through its AlphaWorks group, and began shipping Linux
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systems and building ties to the Linux community. To the astonishment of all
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parties, IBM emerged as a staunch friend of the hacker community and open
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source development, with ironic consequences noted in the FUD entry. This
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lexicon includes a number of entries attributed to IBM ; these derive from
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some rampantly unofficial jargon lists circulated within IBM's formerly
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beleaguered hacker underground.
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