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IBM

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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 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.

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