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.
[glossary]
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