What I took from this quote was that IBM and even DEC were shipping enormous devices that were engineered like digital tanks, with redundant data paths, redundant power supplies, somewhat hot-swappable component cards, and a guarantee of several nines worth of uptime, when combined with their first-party operating systems. Breakthrough home computers, by contrast, tended to emerge from "good enough to play games and play with balancing your bank account," having a strong emphasis on arcade graphics, but not so much on reliability.