Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulRobinson | Hacker News Reader

You should never name a tech product Bob in the UK, because the moment it isn't perfect, it'll just get called "Bobbins" [0], especially where I'm from.

I wish IBM got better at product again, and took themselves off the services and consulting morphine they've been on for ~35 years now since OS/2 Warp flopped. Their 1980s/1990s hardware was great. Their software actually was great until Win95 took their lunch money. They've just slunk off into a corner hugging their old architectures they have a moat around, and thrown out some audacious nonsense like Watson now and again, but nothing has stuck. When is somebody in that organisation going to try and innovate properly again?

I'm not sure this is the answer I'd be rooting for.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bobbins

View on HN

We did a deal with IBM back in the day to adapt our tech as the code generation for enterprise java beans.

The commercial guy I dealt with made it very clear that a primary concern was IBM not being humiliated and shafted like their MS dealings. It colored our commercial arrangements, which had to include "break glass" arrangements for them to gain full access to our source code.

How to not learn from your mistakes and actually make them worse. I wonder how many valuable alliances they lost just because of that fear. Whoever was willing to sign was already probably not going to be a threat.

To be fair, source code escrow was for a long time a standard feature of contracts between small/medium software companies and large enterprises.

It's actually one of the reasons that open source took off in the early 2000s - if the source was already available all you needed to do was come up with a legal agreement that says something to the effect of "EnterpriseCo has a limited license to use SmallCo's software which reverts to full rights in the event that SmallCo is unable to carry out its obligations", with no need to bother arranging (and paying for) escrow.

That made it easier and cheaper to deal with open source companies, and made escrow seem weird and expensive by comparison. But in the 90s it was almost universal in those sort of contracts.

OS/2 was the only thing I remembering being great. If they practically gave it away I think we'd be living in a different world. Pre-emptive multitasking long before OSX/Windows. I mean Microsoft essentially had to force windows (eg. 3.1) down our throats until it become tolerable.

> OS/2 was the only thing I remembering being great.

Thinkpads were great too. I had the Thinkpad 701C with the butterfly keyboard. It was awesome for its time.

They are still forcing Windows down our throats.

You should also never name your faulty/flaky Dell server Bob when Bob is also the name of your company president (though the president came after the server).

Calling Bob (the server) a piece of shit ("Bob is a piece of shit") because it crashed again was a very risky move that we often didn't fully think through.

Also in the UK and never heard of this in my life. Guessing this is very regional?

As with most things on the UK, probably. I definitely used Bobbins.

I used to think everyone called (cobs|bread cakes|rolls|barns) muffins, and it turns out it was just my small town that did it. As in, just my small town, not region, county, etc.

If you call it a teacake, and I say no those have raisins in, and you protest that's a fruit teacake, I know you're probably from Burnley: https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/bread/

does that area have a textile manufacturing history?

I ask because i'm only familiar with a thread/yarn bobbin, I wonder if it derived from that.

It does indeed, probably the heart of it.

Yes. The North West and the midlands was where it all started. Cotton, mills, Industrial Revolution etc

>> I used to think everyone called (cobs|bread cakes|rolls|barns) muffins

UK regional dialects are summed up really well here because despite listing five different names for a specific thing you still neglected the word I use (baps).

And mine! (batch)

It's definitely chip muffin. I have no patience for those heretics up the road with their chip barms.

Hahaha. Chip butty

Extra vinegar please, I want my muffin drenched.

It’s barm, with an m, from barm cakes. Barm is the frothy scummy stuff you get on top of fermented beer, and it contains yeast. Back in the day bakers would take the barm from local brewers to make weakly fermented bread rolls… barm cakes.

(So obviously those calling them cobs or rolls or whatever else are just wrong!)

I think that was just autocorrect to be fair. Barm isn't in the standard dictionary

I suspected that might be the case, but I wasn’t about to turn down an opportunity to share one of my fun facts!

Can confirm. Per the (paywalled) Oxford English Dictionary [0]: 'barm' is The froth that forms on the top of fermenting malt liquors, which is used to leaven bread, and to cause fermentation in other liquors; yeast, leaven. OR The froth or foam on the surface of beer OR English regional (chiefly Lancashire). A soft round bread roll, a barm cake.

[0] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/barm_n2?tab=meaning_and_use#2...

It's pretty common around Manchester. Bit like being nesh. But as you know... this is a thing: https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/bread/

Might also mark you out as a certain age if not from the right region - I’m familiar with it as a word for “a bit rubbish” because of listening to Mark & Lard’s late night show on Radio 1 in the 90s

tbh - my first thought, especially with that figure and marketing, is "Bob the Builder"...

[Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_the_Builder_(character) ]

My first thought was it was going to be "Microsoft Bob for the AI Age" or something. I didn't look too closely -- maybe it is!

"IBM Bob? Certainly they have a license deal with Microsoft to release Bob for OS/2"

They left the consumer market decades ago, as you mentioned, but they've been thriving in the enterprise and government sectors.

They have been expanding their portfolio through acquisitions: Red Hat, HashiCorp, Confluent...

Speaking of UK, I was immediately reminded of the Blackadder episode where the men-servant calls herself “Bob”. Rowan Atkinsons pronunciation is how I imagine this Bob to pronounced, with the same look of course!

IBM actually do a bunch of semiconductor research, which they license to other fabs. I'm not sure how much money they make (probably nothing compared to support contracts with banks etc), but they actually do innovate. At least, a small portion of one of their business sectors still innovates. The rest are probably engaged in aggressive IP lawsuits or taking CFOs out to strip clubs on golf courses or something.

> I wish IBM got better at product again...

I'm not sure where that "again" comes from. IBM has never been good a product and everybody is looking at OS/2 through glasses so rose tinted that they're essentially blind. The PC itself was a skunk-works project that was removed from their influence as soon as the rest of company got involved.

Not so much rose-colored glasses, but in comparison to MS-DOS and 16-bit Windows, 32-bit OS/2 was a dream.

Native application support was limited, and it was even less of a pure 32-bit OS than Windows 95, but for about a year it was the only game in town if you wanted to run 16-bit Windows applications with preemptive multitasking and memory protection, and still had some advantages over NT when it shipped.

I don't remember all the details, but I recall not switching to NT full-time until 3.5, and even then the UI wasn't as nice.

I had thought that in the UK, Bob was everyone's uncle.

Everyone else's uncle, and only on a good day

I thought you were going to say about "bob" being a slang word for a poo.

Turns out that's a particularly East Midlands thing!

Never enough Frank Sidebottom on here

Reply on news.ycombinator.com