DEC: /dek/, 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.