There is a deep irony to it. DEC basically created the minicomputer market by eating away at the low end of the mainframe industry. They would later be myopic

There is a deep irony to it. DEC basically created the minicomputer market by eating away at the low end of the mainframe industry. They would later be myopic when the same was done to them. They almost completely missed the PC revolution. They never quite grasped that the future was in commodity silicon and the desktop form factor. The VAX was a processor-on-a-chip by 1985, several months before the Intel 386 came out. A complete 32-bit machine that could fit in a desktop form factor. It never really happened. In the late 80s they would weakly pursue the high-end workstation market. But a cheap, mass-produced VAX was anathema. Alpha would follow the same pattern, and by then PCs were already the established architecture. It would have been too late to veer into the consumer market, probably.