Dec
    n 1: the last (12th) month of the year [syn: December, Dec]
    2: (astronomy) the angular distance of a celestial body north or
       to the south of the celestial equator; expressed in degrees;
       used with right ascension to specify positions on the
       celestial sphere [syn: declination, celestial latitude,
       dec]

	

	DEC
       Digital Equipment Corporation (manufacturer)

	

	DEC
 /dek/, n.

    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.

	

	Digital Equipment Corporation
DEC

    (DEC) A computer manufacturer and software vendor.

   Before the killer micro revolution of the late 1980s,
   hackerdom was closely symbiotic with DEC's pioneering
   time-sharing machines.  The first of the group of hacker
   cultures 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.

   The first PC from DEC was a CP/M computer called Rainbow,
   announced in 1981-82.

   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.  However, the
   microprocessor design tradition owes a heavy debt to the
   PDP-11 instruction set, and every one of the major
   general-purpose microcomputer operating systems so far
   (CP/M, MS-DOS, Unix, OS/2) were either genetically
   descended from a DEC OS, or incubated on DEC hardware or
   both.  Accordingly, DEC is still regarded with a certain wry
   affection even among many hackers too young to have grown up
   on DEC machines.  The contrast with IBM is instructive.

   Quarterly sales $3923M, profits -$1746M (Aug 1994).

   DEC was taken over by Compaq Computer Corporation in 1998.

   (http://digital.com/.html).

   (1999-06-03)

	

	dec

    /dek/ decrement, decrease by one.  Especially
   used by assembly language programmers, as many assembly
   languages have a "dec" mnemonic.

   Opposite: inc.

   [Jargon File]