DEC hardware, or both. Accordingly, DEC is still regarded with a
certain wry affection even among many hackers too young to have
grown up on DEC machines. The contrast with {IBM} is
instructive.

[1996 update: DEC has gradually been reclaiming some of its old
reputation among techies in the last five years. The success of
the Alpha, an innovatively-designed and very high-performance
{killer micro}, has helped a lot. So has DEC's newfound
receptiveness to Unix and open systems in general. --ESR]

:dec: /dek/ /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}.

:DEC Wars: /n./ A 1983 {Usenet} posting by Alan Hastings and
Steve Tarr spoofing the "Star Wars" movies in hackish terms.
Some years later, ESR (disappointed by Hastings and Tarr's failure
to exploit a great premise more thoroughly) posted a 3-times-longer
complete rewrite called "Unix WARS"; the two are often
confused.

:decay: /n.,vi/ [from nuclear physics] An automatic conversion which
is applied to most array-valued expressions in {C}; they `decay
into' pointer-valued expressions pointing to the array's first
element. This term is borderline techspeak, but is not used in the
official standard for the language.

:DEChead: /dek'hed/ /n./ 1. A {DEC} {field servoid}.