• corvi@lemm.ee
      62·
      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
        20·
        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
          4·
          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
            4·
            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
              3·
              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

    • taaz@biglemmowski.winEnglish
      9·
      11 months ago

      Isekai anime - in general means the protagonist is transported into a different fantasy world from the real one, sometimes it’s thru “magic” or “tech” (mmo VR style) but mostly it’s as a kind of reincarnation.

      One of these animes had the protagonist hit by a truck while saving someone and with the rising popularity of these shows, a trope emerged “got hit by X and got isekai’d into Y”.

    • GeneralVincent@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      11 months ago

      ASCII (wiki) is the older way of doing character encoding for computers.

      Isekai (also wiki) is a sub genre of anime that involves getting teleported from a normal world to a fantasy/sci-fi setting. Getting hit by a vehicle in an Isekai anime has become a meme as the means of being teleported.

      The 1985 in Seattle… Idk what’s referencing specifically.

      Edit: I should have included IBM in my googling haha Looks like IBM in Seattle in 1985 (IBM website) was really hitting its stride

        • yukijoou@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          4·
          11 months ago

          well, i’d say more systems use unicode nowadays, especially if you only count user-facing software…

          though, yeah, because univode is a superset of ascii, ascii’s still technically very much in use and very popular!

          • Amaltheamannen@lemmy.ml
            2·
            11 months ago

            You underestimate the amount of legacy code, or standards that enforce it like AIS for ship transponders or ASTERIX for aircraft callsigns etc.