DEC

Digital Equipment Corporation, based in Massachusetts, has a forty year history that helped define modern computing. They pioneered the minicomputer, their machine ran the first video game, your money is being tracked by VMS,&they developed the Alpha. Digital has always been historically hacker friendly, though CEO Bob Palmer signed a deal with the devil. Digital was bought by a PC company. You do the math.

also known as a piece of equipment made by the aforementioned Digital Equipment Corporation. DEC also produces operating systems like Digital UNIX, VAX/PMS, and the now defunct? Ultrix (which was unix to run on VAXen and Personal Decstations).

1. Digital Equipment Corporation, a division of Compaq Computer Corp, a division of Hewlett-Packard.

2. A 6502 instruction that subtracts 1 from a memory location.

• Function: N--
• Updates flags: S . . . . . Z .
• Opcode numbers:

  dp    $C6
  abs   $CE
  dp,x  $D6
  a,x   $DE
  

Don't forget to add 2 cycles, as DEC is a read-modify-write instruction.

Similar: DEX | DEY | INC | INX | INY
See also: 6502 instructions | 6502 addressing modes

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.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.