(Those guys were around. I worked at a location in Silicon Valley which had a 20 meter steerable dish in the parking lot, the prototype for others around the world.
The Colorado Springs guys were trying to migrate off the DEC PDP-11 to some kind of microprocessor. The PDP-11 (16 bit address space) was very popular with the USAF/intel crowd. Making add-ons and plugging them into the bus was a fully documented and supported procedure, not a hack. DEC sold all the parts needed for that. The usual setup was one or more PDP-11 machines connected via a custom interface to something exotic. In the early 1980s, it was time to go to a microprocessor. But what?
They picked the Zilog Z-8000 [1], because it was the closest thing to a PDP-11. That turned out to be a dead end, but the aerospace company was already building custom interface hardware that talked to it, so they were stuck for the duration of separate projects. Did not end well. At one point I did get TCP/IP onto a pair of Z-8000 based Oynx machines, which were for a brief period the lowest cost UNIX boxes.)