DEC

DEC: n.  Digital Equipment Corporation.  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.  However, 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) 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.