Microprocessors and CMOS upended the computer industry, to the extent that a few years later, all the big companies in computing, up to that point, were in precipitous decline (even IBM, which embraced the new world order with the PC, only delayed this reckoning.)
In those days, microprocessors and DRAM alone were the cutting edge of technology, and they opened up all sorts of possibilities (though this also depended on some additional special-purpose equipment, notably for graphics and networking.)
One might draw an analogy here to the Big Bang. What happened next was like a period of cosmic inflation, in which Moore's law and Dennard scaling (plus fiber optics and the wiring of the world) created exponential growth. As in cosmology, we end up with a much bigger but quite uniform universe, in this case because the growth of the basic technology alone was enough fuel for all the innovation we could come up with.
It was only after inflation that the universe became really interesting. It is still overwhelmingly hydrogen, but it has differentiated: there are also galaxies, stars, planets and people.
So, the long-delayed conclusion to this analogy: innovation in computing is now more mature, but it is not shrinking, it has diversified - and there are still 10^n (for some large n) 8- and 16-bit microprocessors being made, and there are still hobbyists doing clever things with what is now basic, even primitive, hardware (that, not so long ago, was unattainable) - but we also have emerging technologies (machine translation and autonomous vehicles, for example) that quite a few people, not so long ago, assumed would be forever beyond the capabilities of mere machines.