[flyinghamster]

The 11/23 was one of the lower-priced PDP-11s, based on the F-11 chipset. I'm pretty sure it would have cost a fair bit more than an XT, though, especially fitted out with the necessary memory and peripherals.

That being said, Heathkit offered earlier LSI-11 machines (which used bit-slice processors) for several years. As a student at a high school with an 11/34, I would have loved to have an H11 or H11A at home, but the Apple II+ that we did have served the family well.

A factory-assembled and tested Heathkit H11A, sans memory, storage, or terminal, was $1895 in 1970s money.[1] Buying the kit would save you $700, which would have been well worth it since the CPU board was a stock DEC KD11-HA [2], already assembled and tested anyway.

[1] https://heathkit.garlanger.com/hardware/systems/H11/ [2] http://gunkies.org/wiki/LSI-11/2