IBM
       International Business Machines (manufacturer, IBM)

	

	IBM
 /I?B?M/

    Once upon a time, the computer company most hackers loved to hate; today,
    the one they are most puzzled to find themselves liking.

    From hackerdom's beginnings in the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, IBM was
    regarded with active loathing. Common expansions of the corporate name
    included: Inferior But Marketable; It's Better Manually; Insidious Black
    Magic; It's Been Malfunctioning; Incontinent Bowel Movement; and a near-
    infinite number of even less complimentary expansions (see also fear and
    loathing). What galled hackers about most IBM machines above the PC level
    wasn't so much that they were underpowered and overpriced (though that
    counted against them), but that the designs were incredibly archaic,
    crufty, and elephantine ... and you couldn't fix them ? source code was
    locked up tight, and programming tools were expensive, hard to find, and
    bletcherous to use once you had found them.

    We didn't know how good we had it back then. In the 1980s IBM had its own
    troubles with Microsoft and lost its strategic way, receding from the
    hacker community's view. Then, in the 1990s, Microsoft became more noxious
    and omnipresent than IBM had ever been.

    In the late 1990s IBM re-invented itself as a services company, began to
    release open-source software through its AlphaWorks group, and began
    shipping Linux systems and building ties to the Linux community. To the
    astonishment of all parties, IBM emerged as a staunch friend of the hacker
    community and open source development, with ironic consequences noted in
    the FUD entry.

    This lexicon includes a number of entries attributed to ?IBM?; these derive
    from some rampantly unofficial jargon lists circulated within IBM's
    formerly beleaguered hacker underground.

	

	International Business Machines
big blue
IBM

    (IBM) The best known American computer manufacturer,
   founded by Thomas J. Watson (born 1874-02-17), known as "Big
   Blue" after the colour of its logo.  IBM makes everything from
   mainframes to personal computers (PCs) and has been
   immensely successful in selling them, chiefly to business.  It
   has often been said that "Nobody has ever been sacked for
   buying IBM".

   The IBM PC in its various versions has been so successful
   that unqualified reference to a "PC" almost certainly means a
   PC from IBM, or one of the many brands of clone produced by
   other manufacturers to cash in on IBM's original success.

   Alternative expansions of "IBM" such as Inferior But
   Marketable; It's Better Manually; Insidious Black Magic; It's
   Been Malfunctioning; Incontinent Bowel Movement, illustrate
   the considerable antipathy most hackers have long felt toward
   the "industry leader" (see fear and loathing).

   Quarterly sales $15351M, profits $689M (Aug 1994).

   (http://ibm.com/).

   (1999-04-07)