[W/K] :: DEC

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

  DEC
       Digital Equipment Corporation (manufacturer)
       
       

  DEC /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.
  
  

  DEC
       
          Digital Equipment Corporation
       
       

  dec
       
           /dek/ decrement, decrease by one.  Especially
          used by assembly language programmers, as many assembly
          languages have a "dec" mnemonic.
       
          Opposite: inc.
       
          [{Jargon File]