From LQWiki
DEC (Digital Equipment Corp), a company that produced the line of minicomputers on which UNIX was originally created, specifically the PDP-7. DEC has since been purchased by Compaq, which was purchased in turn by HP.
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 Jargon File (and hence ancestoral to modern day hacker culture) 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.
See also
This article is based, in whole or in part, on entry or entries in the Jargon File.
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