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more about dec
dec |
5 definitions found From WordNet r 1.6 [wn]: Dec n 1: the last (12th) month of the year [syn: {December}, {Dec}] 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}] From Jargon File (4.2.3, 23 NOV 2000) [jargon]: 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 From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (13 Mar 01) [foldoc]: DEC {Digital Equipment Corporation} From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (13 Mar 01) [foldoc]: dec/dek/ decrement, decrease by one Especially used by {assembly language} programmers, as many assembly languages have a dec" {mnemonic}. Opposite: {inc}. [{Jargon File}] From V.E.R.A. -- Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms 13 March 2001 [vera]: DEC Digital Equipment Corporation (manufacturer)
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