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.