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.

   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

   <company> (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)
    

IBM
       International Business Machines (manufacturer, IBM)