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) 
 
 

browse words by letter
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
or search   thesauri dictionary search words