: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 have long felt toward the `industry leader'
(see {fear and loathing}).
What galls hackers about most IBM machines above the PC level isn't
so much that they are 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. With the release of the UNIX-based RIOS family this may have
begun to change --- but then, we thought that when the PC-RT came
out, too.
In the spirit of universal peace and brotherhood, this lexicon now
includes a number of entries attributed to `IBM'; these derive from
some rampantly unofficial jargon lists circulated within IBM's own
beleaguered hacker underground.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
