Impact of the microchip on industry over the last 30 years

I recently was involved in a discussion for my current humanities class. This specific class is all about technology and how it has impacted society and culture. The instructor asked the class about what impact the microchip has made to society. I actually was rather proud of my response so I figured I would share it:

I think the microchip had a much deeper impact than that of a direct impact on society specifically. How many different things has the microchip ushered in that allowed more and more businesses to flourish and ‘pop up’ around that technology and do more and more things with it?
One thing that makes this evident is a graph of stock prices over the last 40 years:
http://stockcharts.com/charts/historical/
Look at the DJIA, see how rapidly it began to climb in the mid 80′s when Microsoft and Apple were just unveiling their products? And then another market sprung up around technology specifically: the NASDAQ. In mathematical terms you can sort of think of the NASDAQ as the technological derivative of the DJIA. The growth rate of the NASDAQ after its conception could essentially have contributed to the exponential growth of the DJIA. Sort of like how acceleration relates to velocity in terms of physics. If acceleration (NASDAQ, technology) grows linearly then velocity (DJIA, industry in general) will grow exponentially.

I’m more technically, mathematically, and physically savvy than I am business savvy so my bit at the end relating the graphs to math and physics was my way of making sense of the data