Indeed, there's also a whole world of B2B software which you may be almost entirely unaware of if you've spent your whole career in consumer-facing web/app development.

It is more than IBM used to be a big name in areas where hackers would be expected to be. They have left all those behind though. there are lots of other companies that none of us would recognize that are big, but IBM is a name that we all know as once somewhat important who now are not.

Uhm, the term “hacker” in this context, is, itself, just a coded way of saying “cool developer in the same circles as me”.

Again, HN users are in a bubble, and HN users think that they’re very trendy.

Right. If you are in the HN bubble, then 30 years ago IBM was a big name in computing as the inventor of the PC, OS/2, maker of a great keyboard, and a bunch of weird systems we never touched. They sold their PC and keyboard businesses, and let OS/2 die. We think some of those weird systems still exist, but those never were very relevant unless you had to work on them.

HN users are trendy. If you didn't grow up in the 1990s or before though you may not remember just how picked on this type of crowd was. Now while we are never exactly the "in" crowd, we are respected, being a "nerd" or "geek" is now an acceptable thing. We have come a long way and that is enough trendy enough for us.

This may be a slightly more clear wiki link, especially looking at post 2000 -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

a lot of banks still use the main frame. IBM got out of pc/server game but not the main frame. IBM is a big player in that game.

Airlines, as well. COBOL is still running business and flight critical services.

Yep. My dad sold IBM server software for most of his career. His customers were banks, railways, and governments.

I worked for IBM in early 2010s and Universities were also one of their customers for business analytics.