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.
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.
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.
Sorry you got drawn on a goose chase.
And red hat /openshift is huge in germany. Only startups run on k8s... Especially in insurance and banking.
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.
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.
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.
Except for top performers and people inheriting great wealth, Americans really need to adjust their expectations of what their material life will be. Happily, I see this in young people who aren’t buying into materialism and prefer life style, travel, etc. and realize that living within their means is better than long term debt.
In fact, Netflix is only there nowadays to avoid the acronym from becoming offensive.
Take a look at levels 62 / 63 at MS vs. comparable roles at FAANGs: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Facebook,Micro...
My understanding of FANG initially was that it was about tech stock performance and not compensation.
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.
[0] https://freakonomics.com/2008/04/17/our-daily-bleg-did-ibm-r...
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.
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.
Edit: in today episode, hacker news forget they're a niche cohort.
IBM was synonymous with PC for quite some time.
So I'd argue IBM was a household name as far back as the mid-80s.
This is not true.
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)
They were a huge deal.
I feel like any deal involving IBM at that level would involve some absurd amount of bureaucracy, even back then.
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.
> "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.
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.
the whole thing was an answer to this:
>>>> I told my teen children "... a company like IBM". To what they said "what is IBM??"
answer wouldn't have changed in the sixties, seventies, nor eighties. mayyybe in the nineties, for the short period laptop became sought after and thinkpad the peak of the form factor.
I'm pretty sure I would have known most of the largest US companies as a teen, including IBM, because of their cultural ubiquity, not because I had a PC (which didn't exist).
??
In 1997, IBM Deep Blue beat chess Grandmaster Gary Kasparov and made international news. IBM sponsored the Olympic Games for 40 years, they sponsored the 1995 Wimbledon tennis tournament, the ATP Tour, the US Open, French Open, Australian Open tennis tournaments, the Masters golf tournament, baseball games, auto racing, college football. Dave Bowman wore an IBM logo on his spacesuit in 2001 A Space Odyssey while people argued that "HAL 9000" was based on "IBM" with the letters shifted.
"At the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia, IBM demonstrates the largest integrated information technology system ever seen by a mass audience."
"The National Hockey League, in partnership with IBM, form an alliance - NHL Interactive Cyber Enterprises - that will use new and emerging technology to promote the growth of hockey worldwide. The Professional Golf Association of America teams with IBM to present a state-of-the-art cybercast of the 78th PGA Championship which takes place in August in Louisville, Kentucky"
"IBM is the largest corporate contributor in 1996. Over the last decade, IBM has contributed more than $1.3 billion to nonprofit organizations, schools and universities - close to four million hours of volunteer time in the United States alone,"
"[1997] The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recognizes IBM for outstanding contributions in protecting the Earth's ozone layer."
"[1998] U.S. Vice President Al Gore announces Blue Pacific - the world's fastest computer - which is jointly developed by the U.S. Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM"
"[1998] The Guiness Book of Records officially recognizes IBM for setting two world records in Internet traffic on the 1998 Nagano Olympic Winter Games Web site: "The Most Popular Internet Event Ever Recorded""
I can imagine that there were people who had never heard of them, but they were an enormous company with fingers in hundreds of pies, in the news often, in all sorts of ways - business, finances, sports, environmental, education, charity, employment, investment in factories - in newspapers, magazines, talking head pieces, they were as household name as any massive company, nothing like the "do you know the manufacturer of the Playstation graphics chip???" that you're presenting them as.
IBM had adverts on ordinary TV, like a $40M campaign for adverts with the M A S H actors - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbH50T9jxVI
System to help children with speech impediments - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTKocB22aH4
Speech recognition system, 1986 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pNGO5ppfQ8
Olympic Fencing commercial, 1996 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJznrbLZoTE
PS/1 advert, 1990 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aam5VgLX9ys
Pink Panther themed 486 advert - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS095Os84-I
Netherlands PC ad, 1990 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g0VwEgRzTQ
French advert - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OyZWQUewfQ
etc. etc.
To have not heard of them at all whatsoever in the 1990s you don't need to be outside a business, you need to be under a rock, basically never see a TV, newspaper, hear a radio news broadcast, watch a sporting event with sponsor logos, visit any city with billboards, or be tangential to any of their hundreds of thousands of employees, none of your parents or your friends parents working for them, or anything. It really isn't like "can you name the senior vice presidents of CK Prahalad's management consultancy". It's more like "yeah of course teens haven't heard of Ford or FedEx, they don't buy pickup trucks and aren't logistics specialists".
> "discounting the rampant americentrism"
I'm not American. But if your position is reduced to "a North Korean farmer's child wouldn't have heard of them", then it's not a very strong position.
How, from a funny/nostalgic comment can you derive something like that?
In my world (France, mid-late 80's) IBM was known by everyone because computer = IBM. And computer = important, apparently.
Also the legend of 2001 Space Odyssey's "HAL = IBM shifted by one" was very much live.
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.
Don't you mean NCR, even in light of what IBM did for cash registers?
"How're you gonna do it? You're gonna PS/2 it!"
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?