dec

5 definitions found

dec - WordNet (r) 2.1 (2005) :

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

dec - Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (26 May 2007) :

  Digital Equipment Corporation
  DEC
  
     <company> (DEC) A computer manufacturer and software vendor.
  
     Before the killer micro revolution of the late 1980s,
     hackerdom was closely symbiotic with DEC's pioneering
     time-sharing machines.  The first of the group of hacker
     cultures 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.
  
     The first PC from DEC was a CP/M computer called Rainbow,
     announced in 1981-82.
  
     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 operating systems 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.
  
     Quarterly sales $3923M, profits -$1746M (Aug 1994).
  
     DEC was taken over by Compaq Computer Corporation in 1998.
  
     (http://digital.com/.html).
  
     (1999-06-03)
  

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

dec - Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003) :

  DEC
   /dek/, n.
  
     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 - V.E.R.A. -- Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms (June 2006) :

  DEC
         Digital Equipment Corporation (manufacturer)