United States v. IBM (1969-1982)

Filed January 17, 1969, in the Southern District of New York and dismissed by stipulation nearly 13 years later, in January 1982, by Assistant Attorney General William Baxter, who called it "without merit." The vault's anchor case for a small cluster of business/computing-history notes: it is the suit Baxter dismissed the same day (per contested secondary accounts) he finalized the AT&T breakup; the suit whose 1969 "unbundling" is popularly credited with creating the independent software industry, a credit John Cullinane called "a myth" on the record in 1986; and the suit whose reported market-share and case-size figures (50%→37%, 300+ lawyers, 2,500 depositions, 66 million pages) keep surfacing on Tier 3-4 sources without a primary record underneath them.

References

• claim-baxter-dismissed-ibm-case-same-day-att-breakup-finalized
• claim-att-case-dismissed-august-1982-not-january-complicates-same-day-narrative
• claim-time-1982-attributes-66-million-pages-to-ibm-spinoff-suits-not-doj-case
• claim-ibm-market-share-fell-during-antitrust-suit-price-strategy
• claim-cullinane-called-ibm-unbundling-software-industry-origin-myth
• MOC: moc-attribution-and-origin-myths (business/computing history leg)
• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-baxter-ibm-att-same-day.md, 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-24-did-baxter-dismiss-us-v-ibm-the-same.md