/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.
