[TaylorAlexander]

A few notes: The patents were a huge impediment. They did not expire till 2008 - before then printers cost $25k. They were expensive and stratasys had no incentive to make them $300 like they are today so volumes were limited. From their release in 1995 until 2008 stratasys sold like 13000 printers according to their company history web page. For a long time now Prusa has shipped more printers than that in a single month. The Reprap Darwin wasn’t built until late 2007, then makerbot and others followed. I bought an Ultimaker in 2011 and that’s when it feels to me like home printing started to become viable.

Once anyone could build their own design, a community of hackers and engineers formed that continuously improved the designs with diverse ideas and experiments. That community is what made 3D printing what it is today. And it was illegal for them to do all of that (in many countries) until the patent expiration in 2008. That’s a big reason why it took so long. I think it’s interesting to consider whether this would have happened sooner if they had never been patented, though perhaps the expired patent created a legal safe haven where no one could take away the basic principles by patenting them. Anyway, patents play a big role in this story!

Edit: Some cool history here: https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/interview-dr-adrian-bowy...

[kragen]

Note that Bowyer doesn't mention the patents at all in this interview, so I question your assertion that the patents were a huge impediment to him. Possibly they dissuaded other people from starting a RepRap-like project years earlier, but I think the vast majority of such people didn't even imagine that an affordable 3-D printer was possible.

[TaylorAlexander]

Ah that’s a fair point. I asked him:

https://bsky.app/profile/tlalexander.bsky.social/post/3laiw4...

I think I have heard that in the country he was living in, violating patents for personal use was okay. My understanding is that things are much more strict in the USA, where I believe you can’t help others violate patents so you can’t publish work the way Adrian did. I know that in the early days of 3D printing everyone wanted a belt printer, but users and hackers on the forum regularly expressed concern over MakerBot’s patent and the associated legal risk of violating it. That’s why today’s belt printers have the head at a 45 degree angle. It’s a patent workaround because MakerBot’s patent specified a belt that was parallel to the motion axes. At least that’s what I think Brook Drumm of Printrbot told me.

So even if they didn’t affect Adrian, they certainly had a chilling effect. And I don’t think even under Adrian’s legal regime he would have been allowed to sell the work, so more expensive engineering development was prohibited. We didn’t get cheap 3d printers until companies could mass produce existing low cost open source designs, and that mass production was obviously prohibited by the patents. We didn’t get low cost machines until competition was allowed in to the space. And I’ve heard directly from 3D printer hacker developers that patents affected their decisions not to prototype certain new components. Sorry I can’t point you to a source directly but this would probably have been on the mailing list for the Bay Area Reprap club in 2010-2014, or the Ultimaker mailing list in the same timeframe.

[simne]

> in the country he was living in, violating patents for personal use was okay

Looks like context missing.

In jurisprudence exists definition of negligible case, meaning, harm is too small to run full-featured juridical machine. Same thing considered for example, when tax regulations ignore tips, because it need much more resources to administer than could gather as taxes.

So, laws usually ignore, when you do something prohibited, but nobody harmed, like if you violate patent but don't tell anybody about this. Unfortunately, this also means, you cannot involve other people or make business on this, so this activity will not scale to level, when we here could talk about affordable 3D printers. BTW, this is opportunity for AI, to use artificial agents instead of people workers, but this is very different context for now, and it is not researched good enough to talk about.

[kragen]

He seems to have responded:

> Under EU and UK law anyone can use a patented technology to research improvements in it without paying royalties. So no, it wasn't any problem.

> This is not the case in the US.

[kragen]

I'm eager to hear what he says!

The Constitutional purpose of the US patent system is to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, so discussing how to practice or improve patented inventions is definitely legal. (That's why patents are published in the first place.) That's what Adrian was doing. There's no "personal use" exemption in the US law, but there is an exemption (in caselaw) for research, although a court decision around that time narrowed it substantially. It would be impractical to practice a patented invention for such protected research purposes if the law prohibited you from even discussing how to practice it. But in fact you can even go so far as to patent an improvement on somebody else's patented invention.

There is a prohibition on inducing others to violate a patent, but generally it's applied in cases where someone is selling a nominally-non-infringing product whose only real use is to practice the patented invention.

I agree that, at the much later time that MakerBot not only existed but had turned evil, its patents had a chilling effect. I can absolutely confirm that! But at that point the cat was already out of the bag, and the original FDM patent had already expired, so that particular patent no longer had such an effect.

The question I intended to discuss (because in my interpretation it's what superconduct123 was asking) is why we didn't get something like the Prusa Mendel V2 in 01980 or 01990 or 02000 instead of 02010. Obviously the concerns people had about patents after 02010 aren't the reason; if it was a chilling effect from patents, it would have had to be a chilling effect much earlier than that.

And I don't think it was. We could imagine a history where there was a low-cost open-source design in 01990 or 01995 or 02000 or 02005 which companies couldn't mass-produce because of the patent, but that isn't the history we actually got. Why not?

I think the answer is basically that a low-cost 3-D printer sounded like such a crazy idea that none of the small number of people who even understood the concept of a 3-D printer decided to dedicate the effort necessary to make it happen. Also, everything was much more difficult then. I think Adrian accelerated the timeline by 2–5 years.

But only 2–5 years. Fab@home or the (non-FDM!) Open3DP group at the University of Washington would probably have been successful without him. MIT started their Center for Bits & Atoms in 02001, and they started up their first "Fab Lab" that year. EMSL built their Candyfab 4000 in 02006, which was the first 3-D printer I saw actually operating (at TechShop, if I recall correctly). So the memes were spreading.

But basically I think you could have built a hobbyist 3-D printer in the 01980s if you'd realized it was a good idea. Just as you could have built a submarine in the 01600s. The necessary technology was available. It would have been enormously more difficult, especially before the advent of cheap PIC16s in the 90s. Finding like-minded people on GEnie or FidoNet would have been much more difficult than in the blogosphere. 3-D modeling in 512KiB of RAM at 1 MIPS would have been limited. But you could have done it.

The question I'm most interested in here is: what similar opportunities are we missing today?

[fragmede]

Think we could have had it by 1980, given enough funding and someone with the gift of hindsight. Not sure as a hobbyist thing, given the still nasecent Internet and the nature of funding. But I say yes, technologically speaking, based on the story of how they got the pre-GPS Etak Navigator to work, which still blows my mind. https://www.fastcompany.com/3047828/who-needs-gps-the-forgot...

Though that has more obvious advantages as a product that consumers want which translates to an more possibility for funding. There's a clear need for a device that gives directions, vs a 3d printer. While I'm very happy with my Bambu 3d printer, it didn't scratch an actual need in my life.

Looking for similar opportunities today, we have access to relatively cheap compute power. A 3d printer in the 80's would not have been all that cheap as a consumer device. Today though, we have 3d printers and relatively cheap (for now) parts to drive them - motors/gears/belts/UCs.

While LLMs have taken up all of the air in the room, they're not there only ML technique out there, and while GPUs aren't cheap, they're fair cheap considering the cost of a Cray, back when they made them.

Looking those things, I wonder the number of parameters you'd need for a system where the AI model is continually being updated as new information comes in. What size pet robot would be feasible, backed by a 4090? 5090? 10090 or whatever it's called in six years? Could you make a robot planaeria that had basic sensors and responded to limited stimuli? Robot drosophila? Could you make a robot snake with cameras for eyes? Of course, where I'm leading is a robot dog or cat with an AI model that learns from input given to it by its operator.

Not practical enough to get much funding given the state of the industry; the market for a $20,000 robot dog is too small. The technology is only somewhat there, or about to be, and I'm sure it'll be a "why'd that take so long" after the algorithms for it are invented/discovered which makes it seem obvious in hindsight.

I'm sure there are similar opportunities (the army rejected a robot pack mule for being too loud, but how fun would that be?) Or a food replicator - there are some 3d printers that do chocolate but nothing with an AMS. or how about a specific type of home robot food machine. How about a machine I put flour and water, a block of cheese, tomato sauce, and a pepperoni into, and out pops a ready to eat pizza or calzone? What else could you make an advanced device for egg ingredients go in, and it cooks a finished product?

Thing is, with the Internet and especially YouTube, I'm sure there's someone trying to build one (I saw the vending machine thats basically that, last time I was in Vegas, but it's way too big and expensive for a consumer product.)

Or a robot arm that plays chess or something else where the arm only needs to manipulate the things in front of it and doesn't need a moving chassis, so you can play chess against someone remotely, without being on a computer. Robot arms have existed since forever but it's only recently that we've gotten enough compute to make controlling them easy for an end user.

I keep going back to robots because parts are 3d printable or source able via Amazon, and since 3d printing's really come into being lately, that's would be the thing to take advantage of, in addition to relatively cheap compute.

Looking just a compute there's a load of stuff that involve helping users automate things on their computer, but that's so obvious a use case that many well funded players are after it. The problem with distributed computing is that the interconnect speed between nodes on the Internet is just too low to make it useful, so since Folding@home, there hasn't been one that garnered the same popularity. But we have this global scale network of computers. After the appropriate algorithms and a use case for that is found, it'll be forehead slappingly obvious in hindsight. Maybe as a better AI for civilization games, which afaik still just give advantages to computer civilizations in order for them to be more difficult. If each computer controller race had their own computer to run on, how would that play?

[simne]

> the interconnect speed between nodes on the Internet is just too low to make it useful

Technically, not speed low, but latency is huge.

For about speed, if you lucky, could build 100Gbit fiber to nearest exchange and this is comparable to speed of desktop RAM (around 40Gbytes, so just 320Gbit). But RAM latency is somewhere around 10ns and on fiber internet practically achievable around 10us to nearest DC (1000 times more).

With 3G/4G/5G latency around 1ms achievable.

Anyway, main question is will to do something. - If person don't want to do, he will not, even if have all need.