6 ms·

The pieces did NOT exist in the 1970s. Fast microcontrollers, stepper motors, precision miniaturized manufacturing, reliable and cheap miniaturized DC electroni

The pieces did NOT exist in the 1970s. Fast microcontrollers, stepper motors, precision miniaturized manufacturing, reliable and cheap miniaturized DC electronics, and far far more technology was non-existent at any kind of affordable price point. Look at kitchen appliances or metal/wood shop machinery from this era, still heavily analog, mostly made from sheet steel, mostly non-computerized. The 80s would bring better microprocessors but even the simple Nintendo was an inflation adjusted $450. For comparison the first RepRaps used a full power PC as their host machine and their materials cost roughly $1000 in today USD and needed parts from a commercial stratasys machine. Some of the greatest and most under appreciated technological achievements in the last 40 years have been in materials science and miniaturization.

kragen 2y ago
Microcontrollers and stepper motors were already controlling 2-D printers in the 01970s and early 01980s at higher speeds and similar powers to currently popular 3-D printers. The first RepRaps did not "use a full-power PC as their host machine"; they were controlled by AVRs, just like Arduino (which didn't exist yet). Generating motor control waveforms on a full-power PC is a nightmare nowadays, and was already a nightmare in 02005. The LinuxCNC people would do it by running Linux under a real-time hypervisor. The first CNC machining was done in the 01950s with IBM 704s, comparable in power to an Intel 8008. The 6502 used by the Commodore 64 to drive its floppy drive would have worked fine, though it is much slower than the AVR and doesn't have built-in PWM generation hardware. I agree that the pieces did not exist in the 01970s, but the missing pieces weren't the computation.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Now I'm very tempted to build a 3D printer with an 8-bit home computer and vintage parts.
  - dcminter 2y ago
    That sounds like a delightful project! This contemporary book from Usborne demonstrates the point that basic stepper controls from an 8-bit computer were well within hobbyist reach: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTZ2tQMmpyOWtsRFk/view?resourcekey=0-zt3ZcOMMA30T_LJlUEzoDQ https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTZ2tQMmpyOWtsRFk... I do think that the limitations of memory (and disk) will require some ingenuity in 3D printing more than the most trivial procedurally defined objects!
    - Suppafly 2y ago
      That's a great book, it looks so simplistic and then the next thing you know it's teaching you about resistors and soldering and programming, all in like 50 pages of mostly graphics.
  - aforwardslash 2y ago
    Just buy an old ender 3, they came with stock 8bit cpus :)
  - wilg 2y ago
    id watch a youtube of this
  - TuringTourist 2y ago
    Make your own 8-bit computer on breadboard a la Ben Eater for bonus points
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    My son is into vintage computers and I'm pretty sure I could make a 3d printer from the old c64s, disk drives, and printers in my basement. The hot end would be the only issue and I'm pretty sure you could rig one up from a glue gun or soldering iron.
    - stevekemp 2y ago
      Floating point maths would be hard, and fitting the model in 64k would be a challenge - but paging could resolve that, or streaming/paging from disk if you assume something like CP/M. Logically it's a simple project, though the devil is always in the details!
      - kragen 2y ago
        Floating-point was ubiquitous in the BASIC interpreters on early home computers. It was just slow. CP/M didn't really do paging, although you could read and write 128-byte records to disk. But CP/M disks were typically only 90 kibibytes, or maybe up to a mebibyte for 8-inch floppies. And a lot of hobbyist home computers omitted disk drives because they were too expensive.
        stevekemp 2y ago
        Sure floating point is possible, but if you're thinking of something like a 6502 or Z80 you'd have to implement it yourself - no maths co-processor, or dedicated instructions for it. In terms of paging I was thinking of paging in later layers of data from disk, perhaps from a large file, perhaps from a series of files. But CP/M certainly did have support for paging RAM, in 3.x, if your hardware supported it. (My own emulator, and the hardware I have running genuine CP/M are all running 2.x so no paged RAM there. Shame!)
        kragen 2y ago
        Yeah, people did do overlays a lot on CP/M. If you were using a 6502 or Z80 in the late 70s you wouldn't have to write the floating-point routines; you could just call the ones in the BASIC interpreter you probably had in ROM. They'd still be slow. As for paging RAM, do you mean bank switching? The 8085 and Z80 didn't have MMUs, so you couldn't do "paging" in the sense people normally understand it today.
  - kragen 2y ago
    I'm very interested to hear about the results if you do. If I'm wrong, you'll be able to show me how!
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  An offtopic question: how do you manage to write all the years consistently with 0 at the start (I know why, but how), when everyone around you uses a different standard. If I decided, IDK, to write "cnow" instead of "know", or "J" instead of "I", I wouldn't be able to do so consistently. Not in a world that massively uses the other word. Or it would take me twice as much time to double-check everything that I have typed.
  - kqr 2y ago
    You get into the habit fairly quickly. I type organise rather than organize despite everyone around me not doing that, but it is legitimately difficult for me to do it the popular way.
    - gridspy 2y ago
      Organise is the British english spelling. So you're right somewhere!
      - kqr 2y ago
        Indeed, I picked it up working with Brits early in my professional English learning journey.
  - mongol 2y ago
    I don't even know the why. Why?
    - ForHackernews 2y ago
      I assume they're a fan of https://longnow.org/ https://longnow.org/
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - smeej 2y ago
    Wait, I can guess at why (somebody's probably still going to be alive in 8k more years), but is that really the reason? In case somebody's gonna care enough to read this comment on HN that long from now? And not realize that of course we didn't bother adding leading zeros? Why not 0001970s in that case? (I'm sincerely hoping I'm missing something here and am going to look really silly asking this question.)
- tdeck 2y ago
  > The first RepRaps did not "use a full-power PC as their host machine"; they were controlled by AVRs, just like Arduino It's possible that they were referring to the RepRap Host Software, which was RepRap's original slicer. https://reprap.org/wiki/DriverSoftware https://reprap.org/wiki/DriverSoftware
  - kragen 2y ago
    Oh, I'm sure you're right! Thank you. I didn't realize Skeinforge wasn't the first.
dcminter 2y ago
It depends how you define "affordable". Daedalus (the late David E.H. Jones) writing in New Scientist in 1974 sketched an idea for a laser-based system and almost immediately received a notice of complaint from an existing patent holder (plus ca change ...) although unlike patent trolls this patent holder had actual objects made by the process. The system here was based around a minicomputer (or at least a successor patent of 1978 so described it) so we're talking tens of thousands of dollars for the compute involved in that scheme - but that first 1971 patent must have expired in the 90s by which time inexpensive compute was trivially available to match early 70s minicomputer capabilities. Excerpts from the exceptionally excellent book "The Inventions of Daedalus - A Compendium of Plausible Schemes" which is sadly long out of print: https://paperstack.com/img/photos/page%2090.jpg https://paperstack.com/img/photos/page%2090.jpg https://paperstack.com/img/photos/page%2091.jpg https://paperstack.com/img/photos/page%2091.jpg
- nonameiguess 2y ago
  This history is fascinating as hell. I looked up the name of the person in that excerpt who claimed the original patent. He's apparently in the Guinness Book of World Records: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/463935-first-3d-printing-patent https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/463935-fi... I don't know why they have a record for earliest filing of a 3d-printing patent, but this guy (Wyn Kelly Swainson) was an American graduate student of English Literature who filed the patent in Denmark after teaching himself some basic lithography and chemistry from a library after wondering why no technique existed to make copies of sculptures. He ended up doing research for DARPA and founding an engineering company. Also, for any random reader who isn't familiar with the cultural history of the west, Daedalus was the mythical designer of the labyrinth of Crete made to contain the minotaur, and also the father of Icarus, who crafted the artificial wings he and his son used to escape Crete after King Minos tried to keep them trapped there after he helped Ariadne help Theseus to kill the minotaur. He was also somewhat responsible for creating the minotaur in the first place, as he built the fake cow costume King Minos' wife used to mate with a bull and birth the minotaur. I guess it became a popular pen name in the early to mid 20th century, because it was also the name (Stephen Dedalus) of James Joyce's self-insert character in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.
hagbard_c 2y ago
Given that it is possible to make a 3D printer out of old dot matrix printer parts and given that matrix printers were introduced in the '70s (Centronics [1] claims its model 101. launched in 1970 was the first impact dot matrix printer) it would have been possible to create 3D printers in the '70s. While the hardware and controlling firmware would have been possible to build back then it would have been quite useless without the software needed to create 3D models to print on the device. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centronics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centronics
- kragen 2y ago
  However, the Centronics interface was designed to allow them to build the printer without including a microcontroller in it. (Microprocessors of any kind were several years off.) It wasn't until the mid to late 01970s that it became common to include microcontrollers in printers. As for the question of software for 3D models, see my overview of the history of that field in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42080437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42080437.
  - simne 2y ago
    Just for info, Centronics interface is very slow for 3D printer. It could work (as 2D plotters work), but people make figures faster, and 3D made things even worse.
    - kragen 2y ago
      3-D printers are much lower bandwidth than conventional 2-D printers, and the conventional Centronics parallel port could handle up to "75,000 characters per second", according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_port#Centronics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_port#Centronics. The total amount of data in a print is larger, but typically the 3-D printer is only processing 1–10 commands per second, compared to about 100 for a dot-matrix printer. But the point I was trying to make was that dot-matrix printers predated the availability of microcontrollers, or even microprocessors, and you needed cheap microprocessors to make hobbyist 3-D printers.
Suppafly 2y ago
Sure but they did by the 80s and 90s. I had a cad/cam class in the 90s and the pen plotter we used, not sure which model but HP 7090 from the 80s is similar, had all the technology necessary to build a 3d printer. Hell you could build a 3d printer from essentially first principles using old broken tech and stuff from a hardware store. The first time I saw a 3d printer years ago, my first thoughts was why it took so long for them to happen because the technology was really basic.
- kragen 2y ago
  You will probably be interested in reading my summary in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42080682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42080682 of the things the RepRap project struggled with in the first years of the project; it explains why it took so long.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    >They wasted a lot of time trying to make it work without even a heated bed, to keep costs down. I'm not trying to downplay the reprap team and their work did lead to some of the innovations in home 3d printing, but I suspect a lot of the project is like this, losing time by ignoring things that already existed and trying to reinvent things using cheap household items by going down unnecessary rabbit holes. Thank god that people serious about actually making a shippable product actually got involved at some point or it'd all still be theoretical.
    - kragen 2y ago
      That's easy to say with the benefit of hindsight! But before going down the rabbit holes, we didn't know which ones were unnecessary. If you didn't go down any of the rabbit holes, you'd end up with a US$60k machine built around US$5k ballscrews and ABS and whatnot. The point at which people serious about making a shippable product got involved was already after it was no longer theoretical.
      - Suppafly 2y ago
euroderf 2y ago
> Look at kitchen appliances or metal/wood shop machinery from this era, still heavily analog, mostly made from sheet steel, mostly non-computerized. Yup I miss that too. Maybe all the appliances came only in avocado green or harvest gold, but they held together and did not spy.

kragen 2y ago

Microcontrollers and stepper motors were already controlling 2-D printers in the 01970s and early 01980s at higher speeds and similar powers to currently popular 3-D printers. The first RepRaps did not "use a full-power PC as their host machine"; they were controlled by AVRs, just like Arduino (which didn't exist yet). Generating motor control waveforms on a full-power PC is a nightmare nowadays, and was already a nightmare in 02005. The LinuxCNC people would do it by running Linux under a real-time hypervisor. The first CNC machining was done in the 01950s with IBM 704s, comparable in power to an Intel 8008. The 6502 used by the Commodore 64 to drive its floppy drive would have worked fine, though it is much slower than the AVR and doesn't have built-in PWM generation hardware. I agree that the pieces did not exist in the 01970s, but the missing pieces weren't the computation.

actionfromafar 2y ago
Now I'm very tempted to build a 3D printer with an 8-bit home computer and vintage parts.
- dcminter 2y ago
  That sounds like a delightful project! This contemporary book from Usborne demonstrates the point that basic stepper controls from an 8-bit computer were well within hobbyist reach: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTZ2tQMmpyOWtsRFk/view?resourcekey=0-zt3ZcOMMA30T_LJlUEzoDQ https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTZ2tQMmpyOWtsRFk... I do think that the limitations of memory (and disk) will require some ingenuity in 3D printing more than the most trivial procedurally defined objects!
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    That's a great book, it looks so simplistic and then the next thing you know it's teaching you about resistors and soldering and programming, all in like 50 pages of mostly graphics.
- aforwardslash 2y ago
  Just buy an old ender 3, they came with stock 8bit cpus :)
- wilg 2y ago
  id watch a youtube of this
- TuringTourist 2y ago
  Make your own 8-bit computer on breadboard a la Ben Eater for bonus points
- Suppafly 2y ago
  My son is into vintage computers and I'm pretty sure I could make a 3d printer from the old c64s, disk drives, and printers in my basement. The hot end would be the only issue and I'm pretty sure you could rig one up from a glue gun or soldering iron.
  - stevekemp 2y ago
    Floating point maths would be hard, and fitting the model in 64k would be a challenge - but paging could resolve that, or streaming/paging from disk if you assume something like CP/M. Logically it's a simple project, though the devil is always in the details!
    - kragen 2y ago
      Floating-point was ubiquitous in the BASIC interpreters on early home computers. It was just slow. CP/M didn't really do paging, although you could read and write 128-byte records to disk. But CP/M disks were typically only 90 kibibytes, or maybe up to a mebibyte for 8-inch floppies. And a lot of hobbyist home computers omitted disk drives because they were too expensive.
      - stevekemp 2y ago
        Sure floating point is possible, but if you're thinking of something like a 6502 or Z80 you'd have to implement it yourself - no maths co-processor, or dedicated instructions for it. In terms of paging I was thinking of paging in later layers of data from disk, perhaps from a large file, perhaps from a series of files. But CP/M certainly did have support for paging RAM, in 3.x, if your hardware supported it. (My own emulator, and the hardware I have running genuine CP/M are all running 2.x so no paged RAM there. Shame!)
        kragen 2y ago
        Yeah, people did do overlays a lot on CP/M. If you were using a 6502 or Z80 in the late 70s you wouldn't have to write the floating-point routines; you could just call the ones in the BASIC interpreter you probably had in ROM. They'd still be slow. As for paging RAM, do you mean bank switching? The 8085 and Z80 didn't have MMUs, so you couldn't do "paging" in the sense people normally understand it today.
- kragen 2y ago
  I'm very interested to hear about the results if you do. If I'm wrong, you'll be able to show me how!
inglor_cz 2y ago
An offtopic question: how do you manage to write all the years consistently with 0 at the start (I know why, but how), when everyone around you uses a different standard. If I decided, IDK, to write "cnow" instead of "know", or "J" instead of "I", I wouldn't be able to do so consistently. Not in a world that massively uses the other word. Or it would take me twice as much time to double-check everything that I have typed.
- kqr 2y ago
  You get into the habit fairly quickly. I type organise rather than organize despite everyone around me not doing that, but it is legitimately difficult for me to do it the popular way.
  - gridspy 2y ago
    Organise is the British english spelling. So you're right somewhere!
    - kqr 2y ago
      Indeed, I picked it up working with Brits early in my professional English learning journey.
- mongol 2y ago
  I don't even know the why. Why?
  - ForHackernews 2y ago
    I assume they're a fan of https://longnow.org/ https://longnow.org/
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- smeej 2y ago
  Wait, I can guess at why (somebody's probably still going to be alive in 8k more years), but is that really the reason? In case somebody's gonna care enough to read this comment on HN that long from now? And not realize that of course we didn't bother adding leading zeros? Why not 0001970s in that case? (I'm sincerely hoping I'm missing something here and am going to look really silly asking this question.)
tdeck 2y ago
> The first RepRaps did not "use a full-power PC as their host machine"; they were controlled by AVRs, just like Arduino It's possible that they were referring to the RepRap Host Software, which was RepRap's original slicer. https://reprap.org/wiki/DriverSoftware https://reprap.org/wiki/DriverSoftware
- kragen 2y ago
  Oh, I'm sure you're right! Thank you. I didn't realize Skeinforge wasn't the first.

dcminter 2y ago

It depends how you define "affordable". Daedalus (the late David E.H. Jones) writing in New Scientist in 1974 sketched an idea for a laser-based system and almost immediately received a notice of complaint from an existing patent holder (plus ca change ...) although unlike patent trolls this patent holder had actual objects made by the process. The system here was based around a minicomputer (or at least a successor patent of 1978 so described it) so we're talking tens of thousands of dollars for the compute involved in that scheme - but that first 1971 patent must have expired in the 90s by which time inexpensive compute was trivially available to match early 70s minicomputer capabilities. Excerpts from the exceptionally excellent book "The Inventions of Daedalus - A Compendium of Plausible Schemes" which is sadly long out of print: https://paperstack.com/img/photos/page%2090.jpg https://paperstack.com/img/photos/page%2090.jpg https://paperstack.com/img/photos/page%2091.jpg https://paperstack.com/img/photos/page%2091.jpg

nonameiguess 2y ago
This history is fascinating as hell. I looked up the name of the person in that excerpt who claimed the original patent. He's apparently in the Guinness Book of World Records: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/463935-first-3d-printing-patent https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/463935-fi... I don't know why they have a record for earliest filing of a 3d-printing patent, but this guy (Wyn Kelly Swainson) was an American graduate student of English Literature who filed the patent in Denmark after teaching himself some basic lithography and chemistry from a library after wondering why no technique existed to make copies of sculptures. He ended up doing research for DARPA and founding an engineering company. Also, for any random reader who isn't familiar with the cultural history of the west, Daedalus was the mythical designer of the labyrinth of Crete made to contain the minotaur, and also the father of Icarus, who crafted the artificial wings he and his son used to escape Crete after King Minos tried to keep them trapped there after he helped Ariadne help Theseus to kill the minotaur. He was also somewhat responsible for creating the minotaur in the first place, as he built the fake cow costume King Minos' wife used to mate with a bull and birth the minotaur. I guess it became a popular pen name in the early to mid 20th century, because it was also the name (Stephen Dedalus) of James Joyce's self-insert character in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.

hagbard_c 2y ago

Given that it is possible to make a 3D printer out of old dot matrix printer parts and given that matrix printers were introduced in the '70s (Centronics [1] claims its model 101. launched in 1970 was the first impact dot matrix printer) it would have been possible to create 3D printers in the '70s. While the hardware and controlling firmware would have been possible to build back then it would have been quite useless without the software needed to create 3D models to print on the device. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centronics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centronics

kragen 2y ago
However, the Centronics interface was designed to allow them to build the printer without including a microcontroller in it. (Microprocessors of any kind were several years off.) It wasn't until the mid to late 01970s that it became common to include microcontrollers in printers. As for the question of software for 3D models, see my overview of the history of that field in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42080437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42080437.
- simne 2y ago
  Just for info, Centronics interface is very slow for 3D printer. It could work (as 2D plotters work), but people make figures faster, and 3D made things even worse.
  - kragen 2y ago
    3-D printers are much lower bandwidth than conventional 2-D printers, and the conventional Centronics parallel port could handle up to "75,000 characters per second", according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_port#Centronics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_port#Centronics. The total amount of data in a print is larger, but typically the 3-D printer is only processing 1–10 commands per second, compared to about 100 for a dot-matrix printer. But the point I was trying to make was that dot-matrix printers predated the availability of microcontrollers, or even microprocessors, and you needed cheap microprocessors to make hobbyist 3-D printers.

Suppafly 2y ago

Sure but they did by the 80s and 90s. I had a cad/cam class in the 90s and the pen plotter we used, not sure which model but HP 7090 from the 80s is similar, had all the technology necessary to build a 3d printer. Hell you could build a 3d printer from essentially first principles using old broken tech and stuff from a hardware store. The first time I saw a 3d printer years ago, my first thoughts was why it took so long for them to happen because the technology was really basic.

kragen 2y ago
You will probably be interested in reading my summary in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42080682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42080682 of the things the RepRap project struggled with in the first years of the project; it explains why it took so long.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >They wasted a lot of time trying to make it work without even a heated bed, to keep costs down. I'm not trying to downplay the reprap team and their work did lead to some of the innovations in home 3d printing, but I suspect a lot of the project is like this, losing time by ignoring things that already existed and trying to reinvent things using cheap household items by going down unnecessary rabbit holes. Thank god that people serious about actually making a shippable product actually got involved at some point or it'd all still be theoretical.
  - kragen 2y ago
    That's easy to say with the benefit of hindsight! But before going down the rabbit holes, we didn't know which ones were unnecessary. If you didn't go down any of the rabbit holes, you'd end up with a US$60k machine built around US$5k ballscrews and ABS and whatnot. The point at which people serious about making a shippable product got involved was already after it was no longer theoretical.
    - Suppafly 2y ago

euroderf 2y ago

> Look at kitchen appliances or metal/wood shop machinery from this era, still heavily analog, mostly made from sheet steel, mostly non-computerized. Yup I miss that too. Maybe all the appliances came only in avocado green or harvest gold, but they held together and did not spy.