It appears the PC was a black swan event for the establishment. The establishment was anticipating a mainframe future with centralized servers and dumb terminal

It appears the PC was a black swan event for the establishment. The establishment was anticipating a mainframe future with centralized servers and dumb terminals for the masses. The Personal Computer, and the imaginal political and social aspirations of the workers in that era, posed a very real threat to their hold on power, in my opinion. Throwing money and social prestige at a select and compliant few; diminishing the economic power of the American software developer with outsourcing of jobs to developing world; [non-stop] propaganda about "hackers"; and pouring VC money into organizations, such as Google and Facebook, that had a contrary social and political view to the 80s and 90s idealists and promoted a curiously infantile ideal of the workplace, all took their toll. Today, they have their centralized and controlled servers ("cloud") and armies of coders who have nothing but $ signs in their eyes.