A function of popularity. There are common tides that raise all boats - roles of things in the economy.

We've had a wonderful period where home computers were the place where many things happened.

Now it's supposed to be ending (supposed by people who hope to have the awesome power), but I don't think it'll end.

A home computer is a wide term. One can remember the times and places where those didn't even necessarily have HDDs, and people were joggling floppies with two drives attached. Perhaps a bit of ascese and small mobile media, like floppies (not floppies, of course, just something cheap to produce), as the alternative to big immobile media, like HDDs and SSDs and so on, would be good to reinvigorate home computing. Some kind of very cheap memory cards tossed around like paper sheets. The whole operating system loaded once and not requiring permanent media while running. As it happens in Star Wars EU, I think UX is an important part of any technology, and the world moves after Star Trek UX, while Star Wars UX seems smarter for me. Perhaps when SW is as old as ST, we'll see improvement.

OK, this was incomprehensible. I meant that the limitations on components' prices coming now are also an opportunity for development. Everything non-corporate in culture is being pressed out from the ecosystem. That's good, reduces the incentives to play along with that ecosystem.

I've read a few articles on optical base for computers and companies working on that. That's a thing that allows lesser degree of miniaturization, but far bigger frequencies (due to latency in optics) and more distributed production (gigantic foundries like TSMC make less sense).

So we might eventually (100 years perhaps) have two very different computing cultures, one for those people owning huge DCs and pushing "content" from their centralized systems to terminals carried by suckers, and the other for what I'd want. Including production, standards and everything.