2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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DEC
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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/dek/ , n. n. Commonly used abbreviation for Digital Equipment Corporation,
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later deprecated by DEC itself in favor of Digital and now entirely obsolete
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following the buyout by Compaq. Before the killer micro revolution of the
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late 1980s, hackerdom was closely symbiotic with DEC's pioneering
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timesharing machines. The first of the group of cultures described by this
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lexicon nucleated around the PDP-1 (see TMRC ). Subsequently, the PDP-6,
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PDP-10 , PDP-20 , PDP-11 and VAX were all foci of large and important
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hackerdoms, and DEC machines long dominated the ARPANET and Internet machine
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population. DEC was the technological leader of the minicomputer era
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(roughly 1967 to 1987), but its failure to embrace microcomputers and Unix
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early cost it heavily in profits and prestige after silicon got cheap.
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Nevertheless, the microprocessor design tradition owes a major debt to the
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PDP-11 instruction set, and every one of the major general-purpose
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microcomputer OSs so far (CP/M, MS-DOS, Unix, OS/2, Windows NT) was either
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genetically descended from a DEC OS, or incubated on DEC hardware, or both.
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Accordingly, DEC was for many years still regarded with a certain wry
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affection even among many hackers too young to have grown up on DEC
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machines.
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