Like you, I see many, many parallels between microcomputers in the 1970s and 3d printers now. I'm old enough to remember the magazines of the day (Kilobaud, Dr.

Like you, I see many, many parallels between microcomputers in the 1970s and 3d printers now. I'm old enough to remember the magazines of the day (Kilobaud, Dr. Dobb's, Micro) being full of snake oil as well as genuine treasures. There was always a guy wanting to sell his stock prediction software -- probably written in 1000 lines of BASIC -- for $500, another one who would mail you printouts of your own biorhythms (remember those?) made from your birth date by a REAL COMPUTER, so guaranteed to be accurate. There were teenagers rediscovering shell sort by themselves, and writing rambling, disconnected but nevertheless admirable articles about it. As you said, 3D printers are a nerd thing. Nobody in their right mind would spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to build a machine that can take hours to print a plastic spoon that you could buy for pocket change at a dollar store. It makes no sense. Yet all those people who would have soldered a Cosmac ELF in their garage in 1976 are now using their 3D printer to print gears for their next 3D printer. The garden-shack hacker spirit of the "those magnificent men in their flying machines" variety (to be distinguished from academic hacking documented in Stephen Levy's _Hackers_) has moved on from CB radio, to computers, and now to what's called the Maker movement. And the big wheel keeps on turning.