4 ms·

It's also easy to underestimate how much computation is involved and how little there was in the 70s. The 3D printer slicers generally require several seconds o

by jerf 2y ago

It's also easy to underestimate how much computation is involved and how little there was in the 70s. The 3D printer slicers generally require several seconds on modern hardware to calculate their final path. The resulting files are in the several megabytes. My Bambu 3D printer is all but festooned with sensors and is constantly adjusting things, but even the simple ones have more to their firmware than meets the eye. Even assuming that they'd use some simpler algorithms and data structures, you're looking at vast computation times, and most likely, vastly simpler objects being printed. Even something that seems as simple as "sous vide" cooking, which is basically a heater hooked to a thermocouple, took a lot of little innovations to make practical to hand to the masses. And then, there's the general improvement in motors speed, precision, and cost, along with any number of advancements here and there and everywhere to make it practical. Could someone thrust back to the 1970s and given a fairly substantial budget make some kind of 3D printer? Probably. But it's slow, extremely expensive, and can print various sizes of plastic bricks and spheres and other very algorithmically simple objects, and in rather low quality without many, many years further development. I can think of many ways of bodging on various improvements, but they're all going to have their own compromises, not be garden paths to what we now think of as modern 3D printing. (For example, someone could bodge together a machine that offsets a rod on the printer head, and then in the offset space, has an object to be "copied", by basically banging into the object with a very crude sensor, so there's no generation of geometry at all. But this is going to be clumsy, inaccurate, and full of very complex and disheartening limitations.) You're not going to be printing Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's face embedded into a toilet [1] or anything, at 1MB of geometry. It will be commercially useless and inaccessible to hobbyists. [1]: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6436138/files https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6436138/files

etrautmann 2y ago
Also 3D modeling software and hardware to run it.
silvestrov 2y ago
AirFryers are even simpler than "sous vide cooking". No reason they couldn't have been invented in the 50s - 60s when kitchens had good electrical supply.
- creaturemachine 2y ago
  Air fryers are just convection ovens packaged differently.
  - jdietrich 2y ago
    Sort of, but not really. Air fryers have a much faster rate of airflow than any convection oven, which results in significantly faster and more even cooking. The air fryer really is a meaningful technological development.
    - knowitnone 2y ago
      if you consider adding a fan as "meaningful technological development"
      - ozim 2y ago
        Well it is. We had electrical ovens without fan that were great. We had electrical ovens with a fan that were great. Air fryer has much more advanced fan with much more power than earlier. For me this is how meaningful technological progress happens. It is not like someone one day wakes up and suddenly has rocket that reached space caught back on landing by mechanical arms.
      - ProllyInfamous 2y ago
        I just purchased my first air fryer summer 2023 — it has changed my cooking life, allowing me to rarely ever "eat out" without much meal prep. "Just adding a fan" is actually an extremely meaningful tech development.
    - Ekaros 2y ago
      Smaller volume, slightly bigger/faster motor. Actually looking at the fan there is nothing special with it. Temperature control is probably hardest part. But in general air fryer could have been done quite a lot of earlier. Maybe materials for the basket is other aspect.
- 2y ago
kragen 2y ago
It's plausible that our current 3-D printing design workflow has grown up in the computationally intensive way that it did because all that computation was available; it's easier to just use a least-common-denominator but bulky file format like STL than to worry about the incompatibilities that would result from using more expressive files. People have been doing CAD/CAM since the 01950s. Boeing started using CNC in 01958 on IBM 704s, and MIT's Servomechanisms Lab (working with the Aircraft Industries Association: https://web.archive.org/web/20090226211027/http://ied.unipr.it/silve/meaz/origini-APT.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20090226211027/http://ied.unipr....) sent out CNC ashtrays to newspaper reporters in 01959: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_numerical_control#CNC_arrives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_numerical_control#C.... Pierre Bézier started writing UNISURF in 01968 at Renault, who was using it to design car bodies by 01975. The Utah Teapot was created in 01975, and it consists of nine Bézier patches; you could print the whole dataset on a business card: https://web.archive.org/web/20141120132346/http://www.sjbaker.org/wiki/index.php?title=The_History_of_The_Teapot https://web.archive.org/web/20141120132346/http://www.sjbake... The IBM 704 was a vacuum-tube machine that could carry out 12000 floating-point additions per second and had a failure about once every 8 hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_704 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_704. The Intel 8008 (not 8088, not 8080, 8008) that came out in 01972 could carry out over 79000 8-bit integer additions per second, which is about the same speed. But much faster computers were already available, such as the PDP-8, in wide use for real-time control, and they very rapidly became much cheaper. Any computation MIT's Servomechanisms Lab could do in the 50s was doable by hobbyists by the 80s. The reason 3-D printers mostly use stepper motors is that they don't require closed-loop feedback control. 2-D printers from the 01970s used stepper motors for the same reason. They were accessible to hobbyists; in the 80s I had a Heathkit printer someone had built from a kit in the 70s. If you wanted to print Frank Sinatra's face on a toilet, I think you'd probably want at least a 64×64 heightfield to get a recognizable Sinatra; 256×256 would be better than the line-printer pictures we were doing. 8 bits per heightfield point would be 65 kilobytes, which would fit on the floppy disks we were using at the time. This would have been totally feasible, though digitizing Frank Sinatra would have been a nontrivial project, quite aside from printing him. So I don't think computation was the limiting factor. Your "basically banging into the object with a very crude sensor, so there's no generation of geometry at all" is called a "pantograph" and it has been a common way to copy three-dimensional objects and engrave letters with a milling machine for 180 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph#Sculpture_and_minting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph#Sculpture_and_minti...

by jerf 2y ago

etrautmann 2y ago

Also 3D modeling software and hardware to run it.

silvestrov 2y ago

AirFryers are even simpler than "sous vide cooking". No reason they couldn't have been invented in the 50s - 60s when kitchens had good electrical supply.

creaturemachine 2y ago
Air fryers are just convection ovens packaged differently.
- jdietrich 2y ago
  Sort of, but not really. Air fryers have a much faster rate of airflow than any convection oven, which results in significantly faster and more even cooking. The air fryer really is a meaningful technological development.
  - knowitnone 2y ago
    if you consider adding a fan as "meaningful technological development"
    - ozim 2y ago
      Well it is. We had electrical ovens without fan that were great. We had electrical ovens with a fan that were great. Air fryer has much more advanced fan with much more power than earlier. For me this is how meaningful technological progress happens. It is not like someone one day wakes up and suddenly has rocket that reached space caught back on landing by mechanical arms.
    - ProllyInfamous 2y ago
      I just purchased my first air fryer summer 2023 — it has changed my cooking life, allowing me to rarely ever "eat out" without much meal prep. "Just adding a fan" is actually an extremely meaningful tech development.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    Smaller volume, slightly bigger/faster motor. Actually looking at the fan there is nothing special with it. Temperature control is probably hardest part. But in general air fryer could have been done quite a lot of earlier. Maybe materials for the basket is other aspect.
2y ago

kragen 2y ago

It's plausible that our current 3-D printing design workflow has grown up in the computationally intensive way that it did because all that computation was available; it's easier to just use a least-common-denominator but bulky file format like STL than to worry about the incompatibilities that would result from using more expressive files. People have been doing CAD/CAM since the 01950s. Boeing started using CNC in 01958 on IBM 704s, and MIT's Servomechanisms Lab (working with the Aircraft Industries Association: https://web.archive.org/web/20090226211027/http://ied.unipr.it/silve/meaz/origini-APT.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20090226211027/http://ied.unipr....) sent out CNC ashtrays to newspaper reporters in 01959: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_numerical_control#CNC_arrives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_numerical_control#C.... Pierre Bézier started writing UNISURF in 01968 at Renault, who was using it to design car bodies by 01975. The Utah Teapot was created in 01975, and it consists of nine Bézier patches; you could print the whole dataset on a business card: https://web.archive.org/web/20141120132346/http://www.sjbaker.org/wiki/index.php?title=The_History_of_The_Teapot https://web.archive.org/web/20141120132346/http://www.sjbake... The IBM 704 was a vacuum-tube machine that could carry out 12000 floating-point additions per second and had a failure about once every 8 hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_704 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_704. The Intel 8008 (not 8088, not 8080, 8008) that came out in 01972 could carry out over 79000 8-bit integer additions per second, which is about the same speed. But much faster computers were already available, such as the PDP-8, in wide use for real-time control, and they very rapidly became much cheaper. Any computation MIT's Servomechanisms Lab could do in the 50s was doable by hobbyists by the 80s. The reason 3-D printers mostly use stepper motors is that they don't require closed-loop feedback control. 2-D printers from the 01970s used stepper motors for the same reason. They were accessible to hobbyists; in the 80s I had a Heathkit printer someone had built from a kit in the 70s. If you wanted to print Frank Sinatra's face on a toilet, I think you'd probably want at least a 64×64 heightfield to get a recognizable Sinatra; 256×256 would be better than the line-printer pictures we were doing. 8 bits per heightfield point would be 65 kilobytes, which would fit on the floppy disks we were using at the time. This would have been totally feasible, though digitizing Frank Sinatra would have been a nontrivial project, quite aside from printing him. So I don't think computation was the limiting factor. Your "basically banging into the object with a very crude sensor, so there's no generation of geometry at all" is called a "pantograph" and it has been a common way to copy three-dimensional objects and engrave letters with a milling machine for 180 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph#Sculpture_and_minting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph#Sculpture_and_minti...