The Business Favorite Laptop Has Barely Changed in 30 Years

wsj.com

3 pointsLiftyee5 comments

> (“No one ever gets fired for buying IBM,” was a common refrain through the 2000s).

Oh you sweet sweet child. This is a phrase of long before the 2000s. It probably pre-dates the 1970s. I first heard it at work in the early 80s.

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+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/mod...

Welp 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.

To 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.

https://archive.md/Jx0vF

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