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IBM /I-B-M/
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, including `International Business
Machines'. See TLA. These abbreviations illustrate the
considerable antipathy most hackers long felt toward the
`industry leader' (see 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 does
count against them), but that the designs are incredibly archaic,
crufty, and elephantine ... and you can't fix them
-- source code is locked up tight, and programming tools are
expensive, hard to find, and bletcherous to use once you've found
them. For many years, before Microsoft, IBM was the company hackers
loved to hate.
But everything changes. In the 1980s IBM had its own troubles with
Microsoft. 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 friend of the hacker community
This lexicon includes a number of entries attributed to `IBM';
these derive from some rampantly unofficial jargon lists circulated
within IBM's own beleaguered hacker underground.
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