I think there's one very important distinction that should be mentioned here. As it's described in many articled, the 3D printing industry was started in the late 1980s. But the big reason why personal 3D printing has become popular and cheaper in the past decade is mostly due to a couple hundred FDM, SLA patents expiring since Y2K. The 3D printing industry, just like most industries, are very defensive of their intellectual property. Naturally so because it means profits for their business. In essence, the personal/home 3D printer market is working with 25+ yr old technology. Now If you want to compare that to the microcomputer revolution of the 70s,80s, this is tantamount to having many of the computer companies, such as Intel, Motorola, Zilog, etc. taking out patents on not just their VLSI design, but also the schematics found in their databooks we all needed to wire up each of their microprocessors. This is what basically happened with the mainframe computers since the 1950s. Competition was fierce so every measure was used to protect their investment. Thus creating a market where only the industry leaders could afford to buy or pay for licensing fees to use this new hardware. eg 3D Printing pre:2000. As a result, small companies like MITS, Apple, etc could have been prohibited from developing the hobby and consumer market from starting due to expensive licensing fees. Resulting in the same stagnation of technology as with the 3D printing market. Unless these patents expired, we could have been still working only with Z80 home computers in the 1990s while the industry had the more powerful Pentiums, PowerPCs, etc. I think it was only Commodore who had the business foresight to buy MOS technology for the 6502. But the reverse is what actually happened in the 70s, 80s. Those schematics published in the various databooks from these companies which we needed to wire up these brand new microprocessors were essentially the 'open-source' hardware that spawned the hobby/computer market at the vary same time the new technology was available -- not 25yrs later. So even though the 3D printing market, both in the industry and consumer, has made great strides. It is still no comparison to the microcomputer revolution.