In the 1960s, employees had to take punch cards to the corporate mainframe computer center and wait in line for the computer specialists to run the job. System crashes occurred almost daily. But minicomputers eventually enabled engineers to solve the problems that historically only the centralized computing facility could handle. Later on, pcs enabled the less-skilled masses to compute in the convenience of their offices and homes. Even though desktop computers could address at first only the simplest of computing problems, they subsequently evolved into cheap, reliable, and convenient machines, which today do tasks far more complex than those that mainframes and minicomputers used to solve.
Photocopiers provide another example.
Xerox once dominated the market with its complex, expensive machines. Employees needing photocopies had to wait at the corporate copy center until the operator could get around to the job. But then Ricoh and Canon brought their slow but inexpensive tabletop photocopiers to the market in the early 1980s. Yet as with minicomputers, the tabletop copiers allowed a larger population of unskilled people to make copies in closets and nearby supply rooms. The examples abound.