IBM

I use a couple of small form-factor IBM keyboards I bought on sale for about $10 each a few years ago...looks like the Rapid Access III is the current model that looks pretty much the same, and they sell for ~$50. IBM historically makes really solid keyboards with a nice feel. The small form-factor brings Esc and Del/Home/PgUp/PgDn closer to the home row, without losing the number pad. They're about five years old now, and probably due for replacement (they still work fine, but five years worth of heavy use tends to make keyboards kinda gross and key labels fade and such). I looked at the new Apple keyboards when I was at the Apple store with a friend, and for the first time in my life felt a pretty strong desire for an Apple product. They look amazing. I'm not sure I'll actually like it better than the IBM for long term use, though. But I suspect that'll be my next keyboard, at least to give it a try.

That doesn’t look very usable in the real world. Sick design though! I think the nub is in the wrong place. When i was a kid i had this ( https://webassets.lqdt1.com/assets/photos/16167/16167_2131_1... ) mouse from ibm (at the time maker of thinkpads) and that’s a more sensible choice in my opinion.

My Z840 server I use for self hosting has both bus original IBM keyboard and bus mouse attached. Either works just fine.

Yeah, I got a compact keyboard once because I was focused on other features. Never again. Give me all the keys. My favorite keyboard was the one I had about 1996, but the "retro" IBM-style keyboards are awfully pricey these days.

Well, I installed Litestep as default shell on a 80486 laptop with Windows (I think it was Windows 98 SE, debloated). It replaced explorer.exe and performed better, IIRC I had more RAM free. I gave the machine away eventually, and they probably ran Linux on it. But because the machine was for my mother, it had to be able to run MSIE.

I think this is overly critical and I'm not sure I can see the justification. My understanding from that quote is that IBM is a name that everyone "knows", but fewer and fewer persons actually know what IBM even does anymore or why IBM is a household name. Your additional examples aren't really counter examples most probably for most people; you've just listed additional companies that are likely common enough names that no one else outside the tech/finance sphere really knows why the name is a known name. I don't see this as disingenuous, I see as an accurate reflection of the modern interpretation of many of these older companies. Apple for example is "relatively" old(er), but you can ask anyone what you might get from Apple right now and probably they can name at least one thing like "oh yeah they make good phones" or "I like their laptops." My entire professional career has been in IT/Programming, and the best I can tell you about what IBM offers is "eh, you can pay a ton for a contract for some server hardware/software. Hardware support is fine, but the rest is a dice roll on what you're actually getting for your money." I don't associate IBM at this point with a specific service or product I'd seek so much as just "this is a tech company that you pay a ton of money to and hope it works out for your project". Though I will give them credit for their LTO tape hardware -- that is solid and straight forward enough for my tastes. My personal experience, half the time I talk…

Not much of a gold standard really. I've also a laptop built in 2006, it runs [any flavour of Linux I want] and will be supported indefinitely.

Amber was good but I preferred the flicker-free long-persistence green phosphor (P39) like on the IBM monitor. It had a lot of ghosting but was easy on the eyes. The article is wrong, though. The green in a color monitor is generally a different phosphor from mono monitors which were based on oscilloscopes originally. Studies supposedly showed that amber was easier on the eyes but I often found it a little dim. Computer users of the time, like 911 operators, often worked in darkened rooms to see the screens better.

I find it actually pretty cool. Also, on a CRT monitor of the time, it looked much better. https://i.redd.it/lcez4td885e61.jpg Colors were much less saturated back then.

More importantly, "pre-cloud" means years ago and therefore older hardware, but also yes, software mostly isn't written to be high performance. Modern NVMe drives get 1000x the performance of hard disks 10 years ago. You can buy one that can fit the entire reddit text database for $150 now. 10 years ago you'd be looking at a high six-figure SAN appliance from IBM or EMC to get the kind of performance my desktop has now. You can have TBs of RAM and 100+ cores in a server now. You can get 400 Gb/s networking now, and some people even have 10 Gb/s home internet. You could basically run some of the biggest sites from 10 years ago out of your closet these days. Some software has also improved a lot in the last 10 years. Things like io_uring are great. Green threads are great. Postgres is super fast these days, and it keeps getting faster. My old quad core computer with a SATA drive can already do ~60-70k requests/second with a Scala web app and postgres. That's without even using graal or loom or trying to screw around with core affinity. If anything, the cloud scales poorly. People in practice end up using vastly underpowered VMs, and then horizontally scale them, which introduces a ton of overhead (computationally and management-wise). RDS gets you like 3000 IOPS baseline and increasing that to the level of a single NVMe drive will cost one employee's firstborn child each month, so people end up with this mistaken belief that RDBMSs are slow or don't scale. AWS will provide you…