Hacker's Dictionary: DEC
:DEC:: /n./ Commonly used abbreviation for Digital Equipment
Corporation, now deprecated by DEC itself in favor of "Digital".
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
heavy 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) 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.
--- The Hacker's Dictionary v3.3.2