3 ms·
The Google Ngram viewer shows "fired for buying IBM" has a bump in 1978 and took off in 1983, with its peak in 2007. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?cont
by eesmith 2y ago
The Google Ngram viewer shows "fired for buying IBM" has a bump in 1978 and took off in 1983, with its peak in 2007.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fired+for+buying+IBM&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fired+for+buyi...
Google Books finds two 1978 uses, in "Mini-micro Systems, Volume 11" and "Personal Computing Digest, National Computer Conference '78", but with no way to view the page to verify it.
The earliest use I could see and verify on archive.org was from 1981, at https://archive.org/details/comparisonofinteunse/page/36/mode/2up?q=%22fired+for+buying+IBM%22 https://archive.org/details/comparisonofinteunse/page/36/mod...
- ggm 2y agoWelp I was half-right and half-wrong. But 2000 was way wrong. My direct boss in the 90s had an IBM salesdroid play "who is your boss so I can ring him up and have you fired" as a line when discussing a Dec-10 vs IBM buy. His boss told the IBM droid to get fucked. We had both btw.
- eesmith 2y agoTo be fair, the phrase 'was a common refrain through the 2000s' is still true, even though it was also a common refrain through the 1980s and 1990s.