I work for a mechanical engineering firm that has a 3D printer. It is used for the engineers to prototype mechanical designs (you'd be amazed just how much easi

I work for a mechanical engineering firm that has a 3D printer. It is used for the engineers to prototype mechanical designs (you'd be amazed just how much easier it is to design even simple mechanisms with a model in your hands), and also for creating promotional items: scale models of the company's physical products. Therefore I was confused by why Github wanted one. Were they going to prototype their software in realspace, or start selling people 3D models of their repositories? Turns out it is just for fun, which is cool in itself, and a real sign of how the cost of these things is coming down. Think ours came in at about $20k.