| General > General Technical Chat |
| Why we didn't have 3d printers before? |
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| Someone:
--- Quote from: c64 on February 17, 2020, 06:46:39 am ---What about late 1990s? Most people have internet, computers are very powerful. 3d software very advanced. --- End quote --- Not so much: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_users_per_100_inhabitants_ITU.svg Solid modelling just started coming down to desktop computers and "affordable" (read, unaffordable for individuals) software in the mid-late 90's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_CAD_software |
| jimdeane:
It seems to me that people are getting hung up on what it takes to print the kind of models we work with today using gcode. I think in an alternate history, people might have instead used iterative mathematical formulas to make simpler, geometric shapes. Perhaps infill would have been baked into the software instead of being part of a build file. Maybe there would have been a limited Z height and we would have glued sections together to make simple objects with very geometrically simple pieces. |
| rrinker:
--- Quote from: Bicurico on February 15, 2020, 09:04:30 am ---Patents and especially lack os accessible 3D CAD software. What would you print in the 80ies without 3D CAD? How would you model a 3D shape? What about the STL format - there was not enough computing power to generate STL meshes. Note that the best computers for CAD in the 90ies were Silicon Graphics. The cheapest Indy was hardly affordable for hobby use. Much of the math used in current kernals like Parasolid are fairly recent developments. Regards, Vitor --- End quote --- I learned 3D CAD in 1988/89, an application that allowed you to draw natively in 3D, unlike the AutoCAD implementation of 3D which required a mode switch to a 3D mode to get a simulated 3D. The real time 3D program was CadKey. |
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