:Death Star: /n./ [from the movie "Star Wars"] 1. The
AT&T corporate logo, which appears on computers sold by AT&T and
bears an uncanny resemblance to the Death Star in the movie. This
usage is particularly common among partisans of {BSD} Unix, who
tend to regard the AT&T versions as inferior and AT&T as a bad guy.
Copies still circulate of a poster printed by Mt. Xinu showing a
starscape with a space fighter labeled 4.2 BSD streaking away from
a broken AT&T logo wreathed in flames. 2. AT&T's internal
magazine, "Focus", uses `death star' to describe an
incorrectly done AT&T logo in which the inner circle in the top
left is dark instead of light -- a frequent result of
dark-on-light logo images.

:DEC:: /dek/ /n./ Commonly used abbreviation for Digital
Equipment Corporation, now deprecated by DEC itself in favor of
"Digital". 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 heavy 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