DEC /dek/ n.
1. v. Verbal (and only rarely written) shorthand for
_decrement_, i.e. `decrease by one'. Especially used by
assembly programmers, as many assembly languages have a
dec mnemonic. Antonym: inc. 2. n. Commonly used abbreviation for Digital
Equipment Corporation, later deprecated by DEC itself in favor of
"Digital" and now entirely obsolete following the buyout by
Compaq. Before the killer
micro revolution of the late 1980s, hackerdom was closely
symbiotic with DEC's pioneering timesharing machines. The first
of the group of cultures described by this lexicon nucleated
around the PDP-1 (see TMRC).
Subsequently, the PDP-6, PDP-10,
PDP-20, PDP-11 and VAX were all foci of large and important
hackerdoms, and DEC machines long dominated the ARPANET and
Internet machine population. DEC was the technological leader of
the minicomputer era (roughly 1967 to 1987), but its failure to
embrace microcomputers and Unix early cost it heavily in profits
and prestige after silicon got
cheap. Nevertheless, the microprocessor design tradition owes a
major debt to the PDP-11 instruction set, and every one of the
major general-purpose microcomputer OSs so far (CP/M, MS-DOS,
Unix, OS/2, Windows NT) was either genetically descended from a
DEC OS, or incubated on DEC hardware, or both. Accordingly, DEC
was for many years still regarded with a certain wry affection
even among many hackers too young to have grown up on DEC
machines.
DEC reclaimed some of its old reputation among techies in the
first half of the 1990s. The success of the Alpha, an
innovatively-designed and very high-performance killer micro, helped a lot. So did
DEC's newfound receptiveness to Unix and open systems in general.
When Compaq acquired DEC at the end of 1998 there was some
concern that these gains would be lost along with the DEC
nameplate, but the merged company has so far turned out to be
culturally dominated by the ex-DEC side.