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.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {blue box}{eighty-column mind}{Evil Empire}{fear and loathing}{FUD}{JCL}{Microsoft}{Real World}{working as designed}]