---
title: "United States v. IBM (1969-1982)"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "concept"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "United States v. IBM"
aliases: ["U.S. v. IBM","the IBM antitrust suit"]
first_seen: "2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["William Baxter","United States v. AT&T / Modification of Final Judgment","software industry origin myth","business/computing history"]
---


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