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.