5 ms·

I worked for IBM during the 80s at the height of IBM's power. It was the golden ticket. 400,000 employees and everyone was convinced it was going to hit $100B m

I worked for IBM during the 80s at the height of IBM's power. It was the golden ticket. 400,000 employees and everyone was convinced it was going to hit $100B market cap. When I quit to form my own business, my 2nd line manager said "Why would anyone want to quit IBM?". Long time ago.

kazinator 11y ago
That's 2nd line manager thinking for you! If only suspenders could talk ... of course they can't since their jaws are firmly clenched into the upper hems of size 46 slacks.
- ImTalking 11y ago
  He's the one who said to me "If you walk like a duck, quack like a duck, act like a duck, you are a duck" like he was the Oracle of Delphi.
  - kazinator 11y ago
    OOP visionary, wow. (And if your birth certificate and other papers say you're a duck, but you don't quite walk like one, then you're a subtype of duck. If you're a subtype of duck which has a thumb and a nose, then you use these appendages together to show disdain for Barbara Liskov's Substitution Principle.)
    - Gigablah 11y ago
      That's just anatine-centrism.
tim333 11y ago
It did hit a $100B cap. Just took a while.
- kazinator 11y ago
  Yes; a little uptick in the cap, a little downtick in the value of a dollar and you're there.
SilasX 11y ago
Crazy -- they could have almost been as big as Uber!
- hkmurakami 11y ago
  well, inflation.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - ngoede 11y ago
    Just for the record this would work out to about $220B in modern money.
- codesushi42 11y ago
  IBM hit > $100 billion market cap. In 1987. That's north of $183 billion in today's dollars. IBM was huge in the 80s, everyone knows that. Your comment looked absurd to me, and it turns out it was.
  - SilasX 11y ago
    I was mainly mocking Uber's valuation there :-p
abraae 11y ago
I worked at IBM in the 80s too, like my dad before me. The two things that struck me as unusual even then were that noone in the company has ever been laid off, and that there was widespread belief that the company really did have 2 or 3 generations of new product lines that they kept in storage, ready to release if the competition ever started to catch up.
- mcguire 11y ago
  I worked at IBM in the '90s and again in the early 2000s. (Yeah, I'm not bright.) I worked on three major projects (i.e. things that had newspaper articles at the time and Wikipedia entries today) and relatively minor one (cough, cough, AACS). None of the projects shipped. One had hard technical problems, but those paled in comparison to the management problems. In the final case, the entire division disappeared in the reorganization. IBM has had no idea what it was doing since the '80s, at least. Amusing note about the product lines in storage: the second project was using some very nice early PowerPC hardware for development machines (codenamed "sandlefoot"). Turns out that there was a warehouse full of them somewhere because they got as far as medium scale production and never shipped.
  - marktangotango 11y ago
    Honest question, why do you feel you are unable to talk freely about what you worked on? It seems odd to me that 10/15 years later one would not talk openly about past projects. Certainly any NDA's have long since expired?
    - mcguire 11y ago
      I feel perfectly free to talk about anything I've worked on. I doubt anyone is particularly interested, though. Heck, it bores me. In roughly 2005, shortly after I finished my Ph.D. and while I was busy not finding a research job, I went to work at IBM as a contractor. The project I was working on, xCP, was a peer-to-peer distributed system for securely sharing digital media, i.e. between various devices in a user's home or car. It used a technique called broadcast encryption, much of which IP is owned by IBM (Jeff Lotspiech worked for IBM[1]). I wrote the C version of the prototype distributed system including translating (and fixing) the (horribly, horribly broken) Java reference implementation of the broadcast encryption library. Shortly afterwards, the project was cancelled and IBM's Pervasive Computing division (not Pervasive Computing the company) disappeared like a puff of smoke. Then I remembered why I didn't want to work for IBM again. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Access_Content_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Access_Content_System

kazinator 11y ago

That's 2nd line manager thinking for you! If only suspenders could talk ... of course they can't since their jaws are firmly clenched into the upper hems of size 46 slacks.

ImTalking 11y ago
He's the one who said to me "If you walk like a duck, quack like a duck, act like a duck, you are a duck" like he was the Oracle of Delphi.
- kazinator 11y ago
  OOP visionary, wow. (And if your birth certificate and other papers say you're a duck, but you don't quite walk like one, then you're a subtype of duck. If you're a subtype of duck which has a thumb and a nose, then you use these appendages together to show disdain for Barbara Liskov's Substitution Principle.)
  - Gigablah 11y ago
    That's just anatine-centrism.

tim333 11y ago

It did hit a $100B cap. Just took a while.

kazinator 11y ago
Yes; a little uptick in the cap, a little downtick in the value of a dollar and you're there.

SilasX 11y ago

Crazy -- they could have almost been as big as Uber!

hkmurakami 11y ago
well, inflation.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- ngoede 11y ago
  Just for the record this would work out to about $220B in modern money.
codesushi42 11y ago
IBM hit > $100 billion market cap. In 1987. That's north of $183 billion in today's dollars. IBM was huge in the 80s, everyone knows that. Your comment looked absurd to me, and it turns out it was.
- SilasX 11y ago
  I was mainly mocking Uber's valuation there :-p

abraae 11y ago

I worked at IBM in the 80s too, like my dad before me. The two things that struck me as unusual even then were that noone in the company has ever been laid off, and that there was widespread belief that the company really did have 2 or 3 generations of new product lines that they kept in storage, ready to release if the competition ever started to catch up.

mcguire 11y ago
I worked at IBM in the '90s and again in the early 2000s. (Yeah, I'm not bright.) I worked on three major projects (i.e. things that had newspaper articles at the time and Wikipedia entries today) and relatively minor one (cough, cough, AACS). None of the projects shipped. One had hard technical problems, but those paled in comparison to the management problems. In the final case, the entire division disappeared in the reorganization. IBM has had no idea what it was doing since the '80s, at least. Amusing note about the product lines in storage: the second project was using some very nice early PowerPC hardware for development machines (codenamed "sandlefoot"). Turns out that there was a warehouse full of them somewhere because they got as far as medium scale production and never shipped.
- marktangotango 11y ago
  Honest question, why do you feel you are unable to talk freely about what you worked on? It seems odd to me that 10/15 years later one would not talk openly about past projects. Certainly any NDA's have long since expired?
  - mcguire 11y ago
    I feel perfectly free to talk about anything I've worked on. I doubt anyone is particularly interested, though. Heck, it bores me. In roughly 2005, shortly after I finished my Ph.D. and while I was busy not finding a research job, I went to work at IBM as a contractor. The project I was working on, xCP, was a peer-to-peer distributed system for securely sharing digital media, i.e. between various devices in a user's home or car. It used a technique called broadcast encryption, much of which IP is owned by IBM (Jeff Lotspiech worked for IBM[1]). I wrote the C version of the prototype distributed system including translating (and fixing) the (horribly, horribly broken) Java reference implementation of the broadcast encryption library. Shortly afterwards, the project was cancelled and IBM's Pervasive Computing division (not Pervasive Computing the company) disappeared like a puff of smoke. Then I remembered why I didn't want to work for IBM again. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Access_Content_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Access_Content_System