Yup, I can see how they might not want to become a consumer product maker. Yet they could have parlayed the LSI-11 and successors into the position of Intel, IB

Yup, I can see how they might not want to become a consumer product maker. Yet they could have parlayed the LSI-11 and successors into the position of Intel, IBM, and Microsoft combined, and flat-out owned a big chunk of personal computing, even if they stayed behind the scenes selling chipsets and software. Indeed it could be said that the PDP-1 was one of the world's first personal computers, but it was still a school/enterprise machine at a school/enterprise price.