[W/K] :: IBM

  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 1990s, Microsoft
     became more noxious and omnipresent than IBM had ever been. Then, in the
     1980s IBM had its own troubles with Microsoft and lost its strategic
     way, receding from the hacker community's view.
  
     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.
  
  

  IBM
       
          International Business Machines