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One of my recent revelations was when I told my teen children "... a company like IBM". To what they said "what is IBM??" They know all the large tech compani

One of my recent revelations was when I told my teen children "... a company like IBM". To what they said "what is IBM??" They know all the large tech companies but that one was a surprise to them, they had a look at Wikipedia and said "ah yes, it was a great company in your times". Time to get some wine.

avereveard 5y ago
IBM portfolio isn't targeted to consumers like Apple's or other companies, even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name. The only consumer facing product they had for the longest time were cash registers, and those aren't particularly hip as to live in consumer imagination Edit: in today episode, hacker news forget they're a niche cohort.
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  > even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name IBM was synonymous with PC for quite some time.
  - avidpsychlist 5y ago
    yeah, in my early youth "IBM" or "IBM Compatible" (for the value shoppers out there, such as my family) was very much a household name...if your household had a computer at all, that is.
  - lancefisher 5y ago
    This is true. You had an IBM or an IBM compatible PC running DOS and then Windows. I was well aware of IBM at a young age.
    - browningstreet 5y ago
      How many times was that phrase used in computer magazines? I kind of forgot about it, this thread has brought me back to the days I would sift through computer magazines at book stores.
  - avereveard 5y ago
    At a time when pc weren't household items, that came about quite later
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - mech422 5y ago
      PC's were big in the 80s, and 'PC' meant IBM PC (or clone). The rest of us had 'commodore's or 'atari's - we didn't have 'pc's. It was also the heyday of computer magazine's from PC shopper to DDJ and Compute! Computers weren't as unknown back then as people like to think.. So I'd argue IBM was a household name as far back as the mid-80s.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        Much longer ago than that. I'm quite certain that long before there even was an IBM PC and almost certainly before I touched an IBM Selectric, I would have known IBM as a computer company. If someone in the 1960s had been asked to name a computer company, they would have named IBM and I'm not talking about nerdy niche audiences.
    - ComputerGuru 5y ago
      It even overlapped with the period AOL was a thing. Unless you’re suggesting that wasn’t a household name, either.
  - ulzeraj 5y ago
    Remember when IBM tech powered every popular video game console? Not long ago. I thought having POWER machines for gaming was very cool. It didn't worked out for some reason.
    - kjs3 5y ago
      I dunno. I thought it worked out pretty well...it just didn't last into subsequent generations. But then, in gaming consoles, up until the current fad of "meh...just make it a PC", every generation of console was, architecturally speaking, new territory.
  - op00to 5y ago
    IBM was synonymous with COMPUTERS for quite some time.
  - tibbydudeza 5y ago
    Those PC ads featuring a Charlie Chaplin lookalike was well known.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  > even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name. This is not true.
- excitom 5y ago
  The IBM Selectric typewriter was ubiquitous in offices everywhere, and IBM copiers and printers were quite prevalent.
  - avereveard 5y ago
    in offices
- QuesnayJr 5y ago
  In IBM's heydey, everyone knew who IBM was. Even before the PC, IBM was synonymous with "computer". People knew computers were important, even if they had never seen one outside of a movie.
- trimbo 5y ago
  > even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name I'm curious to see data on this. My guess is that in the early to mid 80s, IBM had to have been the top consumer technology brand. At least in knowledge of the brand, even if they didn't own one. Their Charlie Chaplin ads were everywhere, then they spent an enormous amount of money marketing PCjr[1]. [1] - "As part of $32.5 million in advertising for the computer during 1984, it began what the company described as the most extensive marketing campaign in IBM history, in which 98% of Americans would see at least 30 PCjr advertisements in the last four months of the year". (From Wikipedia)
  - indymike 5y ago
    IBM was synonymous with high tech in the 1970s and 1980s. From the Styx song Mr. Roboto, "...my blood is boiling, my brain IBM". They were a huge deal.
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      Information Society, the band also had a few IBM references in their geeky repertoire.
  - deckard1 5y ago
    my impression of the mid '90s was that IBM also spent a boatload on OS/2 Warp marketing as well. But by that time everyone was on Windows and wanted Windows95. The ads for Warp were everywhere, in print and on TV. IBM seemed to be reliving the same mistakes they made with the PS/2 and micro channel arch.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      I can't picture IBM being consumer.. they were too deep and too big. They didn't speak mainstream .. Jobs had some stuff to sell (aesthetics, art, culture) .. IBM had 'enterprise grade'.
      - mixmastamyk 5y ago
- bluedevil2k 5y ago
  The IBM Thinkpad was probably the most well known laptop brand for 10-15 years. Even now I would guess people still equate “Thinkpad” with IBM even though they sold it off to Lenovo 15 years ago.
  - twiddling 5y ago
    As an IBMer at the time, I remember having conversations about how that decision would ultimately doom IBM to irrelevance since it would remove IBM entirely from the consumer market...
    - bluedevil2k 5y ago
      Don’t forget they sold the tiny HDD division to Hitachi (I believe) in like 1999 or 2000, which went on to earn billions from the iPod. Not a lot of good business decisions coming out of IBM.
      - to11mtm 5y ago
        But... one sometimes has to ask -whether- it would have happened if they didn't sell it off. I feel like any deal involving IBM at that level would involve some absurd amount of bureaucracy, even back then.
    - cptnapalm 5y ago
      Despite not having one, I was mystified by such the obviously terrible idea of selling off the daily "I love my IBM" from who knows how many tech people's lives.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  > even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name. Even if this were the case, they would have been part of nearly every office in one way or another and they certainly are not now.
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  As far as I'm concerned, the term "PC" comes from the "IBM PC"[1] > "The PC was IBM's first attempt to sell a computer through retail channels [...] they partnered with the retail chains ComputerLand and Sears Roebuck" > "Reception was overwhelmingly positive [...] the IBM PC immediately became the talk of the entire computing industry.[38] Dealers were overwhelmed with orders [...] By the time the machine was shipping, the term "PC" was becoming a household name.[39] [...] Sales exceeded IBM's expectations by as much as 800%, shipping 40,000 PCs a month at one point.[40] The company estimate that 50 to 70% of PCs sold in retail stores went to the home." It is worth noting how small the market was at the time though, "In 1983 they sold more than 750,000 machines" - Apple has just passed 100,000,000 iPhone 12s in six months since launch. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
  - avereveard 5y ago
    > It is worth noting how small the market was at the time though, "In 1983 they sold more than 750,000 machines" - Apple has just passed 100,000,000 iPhone 12s in six months since launch. which is the goddamn point. it was a name in tech circles, and this community forgets how small tech circles were back then heck, someone even cited the cell processor in playstation. outside the nerdiest of gamers, very few actually cared, and the name that stuck and resonated from that item was playstation, not ibm anyway. want some name that public would recognize in the 80s? try nintendo and sega. >>>> I told my teen children "... a company like IBM". To what they said "what is IBM??" kid back then would have had the same reaction as the gp kids at hearing ibm. this community is completely out of touch and filled with vitriol.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      In 1970, IBM was #5 on the Fortune 500. Now, a young kid might not have heard of them because they never saw the logo on anything or used any of their products. But I'm pretty sure any reasonably well-educated adult [ADDED: or college student/probably teen] would have heard of them just like they would have heard of most of the largest US companies.
- sedatk 5y ago
  > even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name In addition to other examples in the thread, OS/2 Warp was a direct competitor to Windows 95. We could be using OS/2 today instead of Windows had it become successful.
- cmxch 5y ago
  > cash registers Don't you mean NCR, even in light of what IBM did for cash registers?
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    There were IBM cash registers and they outperformed modern equipment in scanner performance by a wide margin 30 years ago. That division was sold off to Toshiba.
- listenallyall 5y ago
  Not a household name? Not hip? Lacking imagination? "How're you gonna do it? You're gonna PS/2 it!"
- reggieband 5y ago
  It's funny because when I read something like this (and your pretty harsh replies) I feel attacked! I mean, there are a lot of reasons you might say this including but not limited to: you weren't alive (or were too young) in the 70s/80s, you were in a country that had a different culture, you grew up in your own bubble. And maybe, just maybe, my memory is bad. But I really feel almost gaslit. Like where someone is telling me my lived experience wasn't my lived experience. I remember IBM as one of the most recognizable brands of the time. I recall in social studies class a teacher talking about how IBM sold calculating devices to Nazi Germany during the war. I remember another class where we discussed IBMs infamous "THINK" posters, which we discussed in relation to propaganda and subliminal messaging. I remember that THINK poster showing up as a gag in the early Simpsons TV show. When Apple made the famous super bowl commercial where the athlete throws a sledge-hammer at the George Orwell-esque Big Brother screen, every news outlet was going on-and-on about how it was a direct attack on IBM and the stodgy perception that PCs were only for business. And of course the whole Deep Blue chess match. Heck, even the Jeopardy Watson thing had IBM branding all over it. In all of those cases IBM had a cultural currency that anchored the discussion. I would honestly be completely and genuinely surprised to find any people in my age group born and raised in North America wouldn't immediately recognize the IBM brand. When I think of niche tech brands from that time I believe Oracle and Cisco fit that "you only know if you know" kind of niche. But IBM? It actually feels so completely unbelievable to me that it can't be true. But hey, maybe you're right and I'm wrong?
genedan 5y ago
When I was growing up, my mother was at IBM designing software for the space shuttle, and the street next to my house was named IBM. I was named after one of their senior engineers. So the company played a big part in my childhood and was ever present in the community, and we still have lots of IBM space swag stored away in the attic, including the silver snoopy given to my mom during her time there. The stock grants paid for our education, and my mom still lives off the pension they had. The early 90s was such an optimistic time. At some point IBM sold off the unit, vacated the office block, and the street was renamed to that of the new company that moved in. Eventually, all the shuttle workers would be laid off after the demise of the program, so it's sad to see how it all ended.
- pm90 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing your story. I wonder if the children of FAANG employees would feel similar to what you felt. I suspect that may not be the case, since most companies don't really make such long term investments anymore.
  - shp0ngle 5y ago
    I think those companies still exist, but they exist in China. I might be wrong though. I just see the growth of China and decline of the US, and I cannot stop feeling like those two are connected. But what do I know. People were afraid about Japan before.
    - shadilay 5y ago
      China like Japan has it's own problems. In the case of the US, offshoring of manufacturing surely played a part but greater than that is the financialization of the economy, decline of the middle class, and the capture of wealth generation in the hands of a few.
    - freeone3000 5y ago
      And now the world's largest car manufacturer is Toyota, the biggest gaming providers are Nintendo and Sony, and Mitsubishi and Hitachi are important players in every industry. American manufacturing in the same industries are down. People seeing the growth of Japan and decline of the US were only wrong in a matter of degree.
agumonkey 5y ago
I always remind myself that hollerith machines was born in the 19th century.. it's a long game :)
jve 5y ago
I'm 33, allergic to IBM (and Oracle), want to stay away from their products if possible. Luckily I know nothing about IBM, only the spectrum protect backup... I mean why everything has to be so complicated? Ugly? Props for having documentation + they support lots of OSes and features. But when it comes to management... even Linux people in my office make fun of that product, because how awkward, complex and time consuming it is to do particular tasks there. I showed Veeam admin some spectrum protect stuff, because he had todo some task there... He just laughed out loud.
- theandrewbailey 5y ago
  From what little exposure that I've had to IBM, Oracle, and professional HP products, it's the result of a different evolutionary line of computing. It predates personal computing (from back when there was allegedly market for 5 computers[0]), so its interface and naming conventions are foreign to each other, as if it lives in ivory towers and never mixes with anything else. It's painfully obvious that personal computing moves much faster and is easier to use. [0] https://freakonomics.com/2008/04/17/our-daily-bleg-did-ibm-really-see-a-world-market-for-about-five-computers/ https://freakonomics.com/2008/04/17/our-daily-bleg-did-ibm-r...
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Given the amount of work they contribute to the Linux kernel, I expect you not to use anything Linux related then.
  - jve 5y ago
    I do. I can manage services I need on my raspberry. That is not sole exposure to Linux and not afraid of it. Anyways, I get that IBM is a big whale. It just i rather avoid their products. But speaking for spectrum protect... the more I think of it, the more I understand that it is the configuration and usage of the product I really dislike. And the embarrassment of helping customers configuring/troubleshooting that product. Otherwise it is solid. Once configured, does its job pretty well and solid. And we are a service provider - it was actually capable of providing with the feature set a service provider needs to.
dvh 5y ago
The "I" in FAANG stands for IBM
- DevKoala 5y ago
  One or two of those will be dropped in the next decade or two. It is how things go. In fact, Netflix is only there nowadays to avoid the acronym from becoming offensive.
  - jhickok 5y ago
    And it doesn't include Microsoft for some reason. FANMAG always made more sense to me.
    - theandrewbailey 5y ago
      Since Google is Alphabet, we can use FAAAM (or FAAAMN) instead.
      - DevKoala 5y ago
        I like that one.
    - zacherates 5y ago
      ... because FAANG was about compensation and MS is not competitive (at least for mid-career hires). Take a look at levels 62 / 63 at MS vs. comparable roles at FAANGs: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Facebook,Microsoft&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Facebook,Micro...
      - jhickok 5y ago
        I won't pretend to understand how these levels compare, but it looks on par with Apple, no? My understanding of FANG initially was that it was about tech stock performance and not compensation.
shp0ngle 5y ago
Even for me as a millennial, IBM is something of a history note. Yes, I know them from computing history lectures, and I liked their ThinkPads (but they sold that to Lenovo when I was in high school). I have only directly interacted with IBM product once, and that was Lotus Notes in one corporation I worked as a tech support in university years. And it was horrible. At university, I thought of IBM as "they do things that are invisible but probably important?", but now I guess they don't do even that.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Notes interface was crap but it did have some interesting tech. Also it was bought, not originated at ibm. They could have fixed it I suppose.
  - alblue 5y ago
    Not really. Lotus Notes was an MS-Access system that would attempt to do database synchronization between a server copy of the database and the local client. It was built in an age where road warriors were expected to take their laptops with them, be able to enter sales data, then have that automatically merged on return to the office. In a dial up age and before wifi, this gave unprecedented tools to those who needed to work away from their desks. The problem was that it has serious scaling issues, and when you move mail to it (and remember it has to do the synchronisation step when you return) it can bog down both the server And the client. It was far less efficient than, say, pop and imap. IBM took a bet that they could make Notes scale to the entire org in the mid-to-late ‘90s, and it took many years to get there and much pain along the way. Any large and crufty system can start to have problems as they grow older but “fixing notes” wasn't a programming issue but a design one. In todays terminology, it would be the equivalent of a replicated/distributed MongoDB with the designated “master” on the server, with a cached full copy of that database on your laptop (which isn't permanently connected), while allowing writes in both partitions (ie sacrificing consistency for availability) and then hoping when you connect it back up again that it can figure out the bidirectional sync and resolve any conflicts that occur. And then on top of that build a mail client which stores one mail message per row (including all attachments) along with status bits (read, important, replied etc) and hope to heck it all works. Lotus Notes “synchronization” was the step you did after docking your thinkpad just before going to get your first coffee of the day, because hopefully the latency would be hidden by the brewing time.
allenu 5y ago
I interned at IBM Canada in the late 90s and I remember back then among my peer group, the only thing we cared about was that they made great laptops in the ThinkPad line (now owned by Lenovo, of course). It definitely felt like an "old" company even then. I remember they were very big on patents and were proud of the fact that they had a huge patent war chest.
wolverine876 5y ago
IBM doesn't make consumer products, as they did in decades past. I would imagine there are a lot of successful technology companies without a consumer side that your kids aren't familiar with. Booz Allen?
avilay 5y ago
Lots of nostalgia in this thread. However, I recently started playing around with IBM's quantum computer cloud service and it has been by far the best experience compared to other players. Who knows, that might be their come back story!
BossingAround 5y ago
To be totally honest, I too had completely forgotten about IBM. In my mind, they are synonymous with processes and bureaucracy. No idea if that's fair; they are big nowadays, they must be doing something right (other than paying $20M to get rid of Ginni Rometty after she showed one mediocre year after another).

avereveard 5y ago

IBM portfolio isn't targeted to consumers like Apple's or other companies, even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name. The only consumer facing product they had for the longest time were cash registers, and those aren't particularly hip as to live in consumer imagination Edit: in today episode, hacker news forget they're a niche cohort.

ComputerGuru 5y ago
> even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name IBM was synonymous with PC for quite some time.
- avidpsychlist 5y ago
  yeah, in my early youth "IBM" or "IBM Compatible" (for the value shoppers out there, such as my family) was very much a household name...if your household had a computer at all, that is.
- lancefisher 5y ago
  This is true. You had an IBM or an IBM compatible PC running DOS and then Windows. I was well aware of IBM at a young age.
  - browningstreet 5y ago
    How many times was that phrase used in computer magazines? I kind of forgot about it, this thread has brought me back to the days I would sift through computer magazines at book stores.
- avereveard 5y ago
  At a time when pc weren't household items, that came about quite later
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - mech422 5y ago
    PC's were big in the 80s, and 'PC' meant IBM PC (or clone). The rest of us had 'commodore's or 'atari's - we didn't have 'pc's. It was also the heyday of computer magazine's from PC shopper to DDJ and Compute! Computers weren't as unknown back then as people like to think.. So I'd argue IBM was a household name as far back as the mid-80s.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Much longer ago than that. I'm quite certain that long before there even was an IBM PC and almost certainly before I touched an IBM Selectric, I would have known IBM as a computer company. If someone in the 1960s had been asked to name a computer company, they would have named IBM and I'm not talking about nerdy niche audiences.
  - ComputerGuru 5y ago
    It even overlapped with the period AOL was a thing. Unless you’re suggesting that wasn’t a household name, either.
- ulzeraj 5y ago
  Remember when IBM tech powered every popular video game console? Not long ago. I thought having POWER machines for gaming was very cool. It didn't worked out for some reason.
  - kjs3 5y ago
    I dunno. I thought it worked out pretty well...it just didn't last into subsequent generations. But then, in gaming consoles, up until the current fad of "meh...just make it a PC", every generation of console was, architecturally speaking, new territory.
- op00to 5y ago
  IBM was synonymous with COMPUTERS for quite some time.
- tibbydudeza 5y ago
  Those PC ads featuring a Charlie Chaplin lookalike was well known.
pessimizer 5y ago
> even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name. This is not true.
excitom 5y ago
The IBM Selectric typewriter was ubiquitous in offices everywhere, and IBM copiers and printers were quite prevalent.
- avereveard 5y ago
  in offices
QuesnayJr 5y ago
In IBM's heydey, everyone knew who IBM was. Even before the PC, IBM was synonymous with "computer". People knew computers were important, even if they had never seen one outside of a movie.
trimbo 5y ago
> even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name I'm curious to see data on this. My guess is that in the early to mid 80s, IBM had to have been the top consumer technology brand. At least in knowledge of the brand, even if they didn't own one. Their Charlie Chaplin ads were everywhere, then they spent an enormous amount of money marketing PCjr[1]. [1] - "As part of $32.5 million in advertising for the computer during 1984, it began what the company described as the most extensive marketing campaign in IBM history, in which 98% of Americans would see at least 30 PCjr advertisements in the last four months of the year". (From Wikipedia)
- indymike 5y ago
  IBM was synonymous with high tech in the 1970s and 1980s. From the Styx song Mr. Roboto, "...my blood is boiling, my brain IBM". They were a huge deal.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Information Society, the band also had a few IBM references in their geeky repertoire.
- deckard1 5y ago
  my impression of the mid '90s was that IBM also spent a boatload on OS/2 Warp marketing as well. But by that time everyone was on Windows and wanted Windows95. The ads for Warp were everywhere, in print and on TV. IBM seemed to be reliving the same mistakes they made with the PS/2 and micro channel arch.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    I can't picture IBM being consumer.. they were too deep and too big. They didn't speak mainstream .. Jobs had some stuff to sell (aesthetics, art, culture) .. IBM had 'enterprise grade'.
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
bluedevil2k 5y ago
The IBM Thinkpad was probably the most well known laptop brand for 10-15 years. Even now I would guess people still equate “Thinkpad” with IBM even though they sold it off to Lenovo 15 years ago.
- twiddling 5y ago
  As an IBMer at the time, I remember having conversations about how that decision would ultimately doom IBM to irrelevance since it would remove IBM entirely from the consumer market...
  - bluedevil2k 5y ago
    Don’t forget they sold the tiny HDD division to Hitachi (I believe) in like 1999 or 2000, which went on to earn billions from the iPod. Not a lot of good business decisions coming out of IBM.
    - to11mtm 5y ago
      But... one sometimes has to ask -whether- it would have happened if they didn't sell it off. I feel like any deal involving IBM at that level would involve some absurd amount of bureaucracy, even back then.
  - cptnapalm 5y ago
    Despite not having one, I was mystified by such the obviously terrible idea of selling off the daily "I love my IBM" from who knows how many tech people's lives.
MattGaiser 5y ago
> even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name. Even if this were the case, they would have been part of nearly every office in one way or another and they certainly are not now.
jodrellblank 5y ago
As far as I'm concerned, the term "PC" comes from the "IBM PC"[1] > "The PC was IBM's first attempt to sell a computer through retail channels [...] they partnered with the retail chains ComputerLand and Sears Roebuck" > "Reception was overwhelmingly positive [...] the IBM PC immediately became the talk of the entire computing industry.[38] Dealers were overwhelmed with orders [...] By the time the machine was shipping, the term "PC" was becoming a household name.[39] [...] Sales exceeded IBM's expectations by as much as 800%, shipping 40,000 PCs a month at one point.[40] The company estimate that 50 to 70% of PCs sold in retail stores went to the home." It is worth noting how small the market was at the time though, "In 1983 they sold more than 750,000 machines" - Apple has just passed 100,000,000 iPhone 12s in six months since launch. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
- avereveard 5y ago
  > It is worth noting how small the market was at the time though, "In 1983 they sold more than 750,000 machines" - Apple has just passed 100,000,000 iPhone 12s in six months since launch. which is the goddamn point. it was a name in tech circles, and this community forgets how small tech circles were back then heck, someone even cited the cell processor in playstation. outside the nerdiest of gamers, very few actually cared, and the name that stuck and resonated from that item was playstation, not ibm anyway. want some name that public would recognize in the 80s? try nintendo and sega. >>>> I told my teen children "... a company like IBM". To what they said "what is IBM??" kid back then would have had the same reaction as the gp kids at hearing ibm. this community is completely out of touch and filled with vitriol.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    In 1970, IBM was #5 on the Fortune 500. Now, a young kid might not have heard of them because they never saw the logo on anything or used any of their products. But I'm pretty sure any reasonably well-educated adult [ADDED: or college student/probably teen] would have heard of them just like they would have heard of most of the largest US companies.
sedatk 5y ago
> even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name In addition to other examples in the thread, OS/2 Warp was a direct competitor to Windows 95. We could be using OS/2 today instead of Windows had it become successful.
cmxch 5y ago
> cash registers Don't you mean NCR, even in light of what IBM did for cash registers?
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  There were IBM cash registers and they outperformed modern equipment in scanner performance by a wide margin 30 years ago. That division was sold off to Toshiba.
listenallyall 5y ago
Not a household name? Not hip? Lacking imagination? "How're you gonna do it? You're gonna PS/2 it!"
reggieband 5y ago
It's funny because when I read something like this (and your pretty harsh replies) I feel attacked! I mean, there are a lot of reasons you might say this including but not limited to: you weren't alive (or were too young) in the 70s/80s, you were in a country that had a different culture, you grew up in your own bubble. And maybe, just maybe, my memory is bad. But I really feel almost gaslit. Like where someone is telling me my lived experience wasn't my lived experience. I remember IBM as one of the most recognizable brands of the time. I recall in social studies class a teacher talking about how IBM sold calculating devices to Nazi Germany during the war. I remember another class where we discussed IBMs infamous "THINK" posters, which we discussed in relation to propaganda and subliminal messaging. I remember that THINK poster showing up as a gag in the early Simpsons TV show. When Apple made the famous super bowl commercial where the athlete throws a sledge-hammer at the George Orwell-esque Big Brother screen, every news outlet was going on-and-on about how it was a direct attack on IBM and the stodgy perception that PCs were only for business. And of course the whole Deep Blue chess match. Heck, even the Jeopardy Watson thing had IBM branding all over it. In all of those cases IBM had a cultural currency that anchored the discussion. I would honestly be completely and genuinely surprised to find any people in my age group born and raised in North America wouldn't immediately recognize the IBM brand. When I think of niche tech brands from that time I believe Oracle and Cisco fit that "you only know if you know" kind of niche. But IBM? It actually feels so completely unbelievable to me that it can't be true. But hey, maybe you're right and I'm wrong?

genedan 5y ago

When I was growing up, my mother was at IBM designing software for the space shuttle, and the street next to my house was named IBM. I was named after one of their senior engineers. So the company played a big part in my childhood and was ever present in the community, and we still have lots of IBM space swag stored away in the attic, including the silver snoopy given to my mom during her time there. The stock grants paid for our education, and my mom still lives off the pension they had. The early 90s was such an optimistic time. At some point IBM sold off the unit, vacated the office block, and the street was renamed to that of the new company that moved in. Eventually, all the shuttle workers would be laid off after the demise of the program, so it's sad to see how it all ended.

pm90 5y ago
Thanks for sharing your story. I wonder if the children of FAANG employees would feel similar to what you felt. I suspect that may not be the case, since most companies don't really make such long term investments anymore.
- shp0ngle 5y ago
  I think those companies still exist, but they exist in China. I might be wrong though. I just see the growth of China and decline of the US, and I cannot stop feeling like those two are connected. But what do I know. People were afraid about Japan before.
  - shadilay 5y ago
    China like Japan has it's own problems. In the case of the US, offshoring of manufacturing surely played a part but greater than that is the financialization of the economy, decline of the middle class, and the capture of wealth generation in the hands of a few.
  - freeone3000 5y ago
    And now the world's largest car manufacturer is Toyota, the biggest gaming providers are Nintendo and Sony, and Mitsubishi and Hitachi are important players in every industry. American manufacturing in the same industries are down. People seeing the growth of Japan and decline of the US were only wrong in a matter of degree.

agumonkey 5y ago

I always remind myself that hollerith machines was born in the 19th century.. it's a long game :)

jve 5y ago

I'm 33, allergic to IBM (and Oracle), want to stay away from their products if possible. Luckily I know nothing about IBM, only the spectrum protect backup... I mean why everything has to be so complicated? Ugly? Props for having documentation + they support lots of OSes and features. But when it comes to management... even Linux people in my office make fun of that product, because how awkward, complex and time consuming it is to do particular tasks there. I showed Veeam admin some spectrum protect stuff, because he had todo some task there... He just laughed out loud.

theandrewbailey 5y ago
From what little exposure that I've had to IBM, Oracle, and professional HP products, it's the result of a different evolutionary line of computing. It predates personal computing (from back when there was allegedly market for 5 computers[0]), so its interface and naming conventions are foreign to each other, as if it lives in ivory towers and never mixes with anything else. It's painfully obvious that personal computing moves much faster and is easier to use. [0] https://freakonomics.com/2008/04/17/our-daily-bleg-did-ibm-really-see-a-world-market-for-about-five-computers/ https://freakonomics.com/2008/04/17/our-daily-bleg-did-ibm-r...
pjmlp 5y ago
Given the amount of work they contribute to the Linux kernel, I expect you not to use anything Linux related then.
- jve 5y ago
  I do. I can manage services I need on my raspberry. That is not sole exposure to Linux and not afraid of it. Anyways, I get that IBM is a big whale. It just i rather avoid their products. But speaking for spectrum protect... the more I think of it, the more I understand that it is the configuration and usage of the product I really dislike. And the embarrassment of helping customers configuring/troubleshooting that product. Otherwise it is solid. Once configured, does its job pretty well and solid. And we are a service provider - it was actually capable of providing with the feature set a service provider needs to.

dvh 5y ago

The "I" in FAANG stands for IBM

DevKoala 5y ago
One or two of those will be dropped in the next decade or two. It is how things go. In fact, Netflix is only there nowadays to avoid the acronym from becoming offensive.
- jhickok 5y ago
  And it doesn't include Microsoft for some reason. FANMAG always made more sense to me.
  - theandrewbailey 5y ago
    Since Google is Alphabet, we can use FAAAM (or FAAAMN) instead.
    - DevKoala 5y ago
      I like that one.
  - zacherates 5y ago
    ... because FAANG was about compensation and MS is not competitive (at least for mid-career hires). Take a look at levels 62 / 63 at MS vs. comparable roles at FAANGs: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Facebook,Microsoft&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Facebook,Micro...
    - jhickok 5y ago
      I won't pretend to understand how these levels compare, but it looks on par with Apple, no? My understanding of FANG initially was that it was about tech stock performance and not compensation.

shp0ngle 5y ago

Even for me as a millennial, IBM is something of a history note. Yes, I know them from computing history lectures, and I liked their ThinkPads (but they sold that to Lenovo when I was in high school). I have only directly interacted with IBM product once, and that was Lotus Notes in one corporation I worked as a tech support in university years. And it was horrible. At university, I thought of IBM as "they do things that are invisible but probably important?", but now I guess they don't do even that.

mixmastamyk 5y ago
Notes interface was crap but it did have some interesting tech. Also it was bought, not originated at ibm. They could have fixed it I suppose.
- alblue 5y ago
  Not really. Lotus Notes was an MS-Access system that would attempt to do database synchronization between a server copy of the database and the local client. It was built in an age where road warriors were expected to take their laptops with them, be able to enter sales data, then have that automatically merged on return to the office. In a dial up age and before wifi, this gave unprecedented tools to those who needed to work away from their desks. The problem was that it has serious scaling issues, and when you move mail to it (and remember it has to do the synchronisation step when you return) it can bog down both the server And the client. It was far less efficient than, say, pop and imap. IBM took a bet that they could make Notes scale to the entire org in the mid-to-late ‘90s, and it took many years to get there and much pain along the way. Any large and crufty system can start to have problems as they grow older but “fixing notes” wasn't a programming issue but a design one. In todays terminology, it would be the equivalent of a replicated/distributed MongoDB with the designated “master” on the server, with a cached full copy of that database on your laptop (which isn't permanently connected), while allowing writes in both partitions (ie sacrificing consistency for availability) and then hoping when you connect it back up again that it can figure out the bidirectional sync and resolve any conflicts that occur. And then on top of that build a mail client which stores one mail message per row (including all attachments) along with status bits (read, important, replied etc) and hope to heck it all works. Lotus Notes “synchronization” was the step you did after docking your thinkpad just before going to get your first coffee of the day, because hopefully the latency would be hidden by the brewing time.

allenu 5y ago

I interned at IBM Canada in the late 90s and I remember back then among my peer group, the only thing we cared about was that they made great laptops in the ThinkPad line (now owned by Lenovo, of course). It definitely felt like an "old" company even then. I remember they were very big on patents and were proud of the fact that they had a huge patent war chest.

wolverine876 5y ago

IBM doesn't make consumer products, as they did in decades past. I would imagine there are a lot of successful technology companies without a consumer side that your kids aren't familiar with. Booz Allen?

avilay 5y ago

Lots of nostalgia in this thread. However, I recently started playing around with IBM's quantum computer cloud service and it has been by far the best experience compared to other players. Who knows, that might be their come back story!

BossingAround 5y ago

To be totally honest, I too had completely forgotten about IBM. In my mind, they are synonymous with processes and bureaucracy. No idea if that's fair; they are big nowadays, they must be doing something right (other than paying $20M to get rid of Ginni Rometty after she showed one mediocre year after another).