At the time it wasn’t at all clear that microcomputers and their architecture would graduate from being toys for hobbyists to ruling the computing world. It was

At the time it wasn’t at all clear that microcomputers and their architecture would graduate from being toys for hobbyists to ruling the computing world. It was assumed in many circles (including Intel, apparently) that minis and mainframes—really, more “modular” less “integrated” architectures—would own the enterprise. (The dependence on Ada makes a lot more sense in this context: Your mainframe vendor telling you what language you could use wasn’t odd at all in that space.) DEC also essentially fell victim to this misapprehension, and unlike Intel didn’t have a Plan B.