DEC
: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.
Jargon File Version 4.3.1, 29 JUN 2001 =
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