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.
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