• corvi@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    Isekai is a popular genre of manga and anime involving a character being reborn in another world, or more recently as some weird item or monster. Often this is initiated by the character dying. (See “truck-kun”).

    In this scenario, after incorrectly pronouncing ASCII, the American character encoding standard, as isekai, the speaker is hit by an IBM truck (a company famous for its early advances in computing, among other things), and is reborn around the time they had market dominance in personal computers.

    I don’t think IBM had much of anything to do with the creation or popularization of the ASCII standard, but memes can’t all be perfectly accurate.

    Hope this helps!

    • corvi@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Also, Seattle should be a reference to Microsoft. It seems IBM and Microsoft started an operating system collaboration in 1985, but somebody more knowledgeable is going to have to weigh in.

      • AMDIsOurLord@lemmy.ml
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        11 months ago

        Microsoft was originally contracted by IBM to develop an operating system for PC. Yes, THE original IBM PC that gave PC it’s name. The IBM PC/DOS {and MSDOS} are basically results of this (they completed with CP/M and DR-DOS).

        Microsoft and IBM had a partnership on PC operating systems until they parted with IBM OS/2 and Windows NT

        I’m typing all of this from memory so go to Wikipedia for accurate shit

        • psud@aussie.zone
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          11 months ago

          And IBM asked for Microsoft to do the operating system because they had just survived an anti trust trial, and didn’t dare release a system with their own OS for fear of reigniting the anti trust case

          Otherwise PCs would have shipped with Unix

          • AMDIsOurLord@lemmy.ml
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            11 months ago

            Considering the hardware of the PC, fat chance Unix would run. They’d have to make a very cut down somewhat unix- resembling OS