The quote is also taken out of context. "Uncle Ken" (as we DECcies referred to him in-house) was of course, talking about the "mini-computers" of the day: where "mini" meant about the size of two refrigerators, not including the washing-machine-sized hard drives, refrigerator-sized tape drives, and piano-sized printer.
Yeah, not exactly a home-friendly setup.
But fun to play text-based
Adventure and
Empire on!
(Picture is a setup for the VAX 11/780, which was in development at the time of the quote, and for which I wrote some of the micro-code.)