Dec
     n 1: the last (12th) month of the year [syn: {December}]
     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}]
Source: WordNet® 2.0

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.


Source: The Jargon File

DEC
     Digital Equipment Corporation (manufacturer)
     
     
Source: Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms