Dec

The trade name for Digital Equipment Corporation's earlier products (DECmate, DECnet, etc.). Many people used to refer to the company as DEC. In 1998, Digital was acquired by Compaq. See Digital Equipment.

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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.

Look up DEC, Dec, or dec. in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

DEC, dec or Dec may refer to:

Places

• Deč, a village in Serbia
• Decatur Airport, Decatur, Illinois (ICAO airport code)
• Derwent Entertainment Centre, an entertainment centre in Hobart, Australia
• Doncaster Education City, a development in South Yorkshire

People

• Francis E. Dec (1926–1996), U.S. conspiracy theorist and cult "kook"
• Declan Donnelly (from Ant & Dec), a United Kingdom television presenter

Organizations

• Dheeraj and East Coast LLC, Dubai
• Department of Environment and Conservation, Australia
• Digital Equipment Corporation, a defunct computer and technology company
• Disasters Emergency Committee, coordinates 13 disaster relief charities in the United Kingdom
• New York State Department of Environmental Conservation

Abbreviations, initialisms, acronyms

• Distance Education Council, Autonomous Body of Government of India for Open and Distance Education
• December, a month of the year in the Gregorian Calendar
• Decent, average.
• Declination, a term from astronomy
• Diethylcarbamazine, an anti-parasite drug
• Diplome d’Études Collegiales (in French), a college studies diploma issued in Quebec
• Oratorical Declamation, an event in competitive debate
• Display Energy Certificate, a UK requirement to show a certificate rating energy performance in public buildings.
• Decimal, for example in ASCII charts

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