Last year, a friend of mine told me about the Arduino. He was using one with his model railroad. Hang on, I said, you don’t know anything about computers. “I don’t need to”, he replied. “It only took me a few weeks to learn how to use the Arduino.” My friend is a business executive. The Arduino went on my Christmas wish list (thanks Bob) and I have not looked back.
This question just might signal a paradigm shift. It certainly has in the past. We humans learn by thinking and doing, usually together. What will you do with your 3D printer?
When I built my first computer forty years ago, the first question my friends asked was “what will you do with it?” When I got my first high-speed internet connection twenty years ago, the first question my friends asked was “what will you do with it?” When built my first 3D printer this year, the first question my friends asked was… you guessed it. (Sadly, the second question they ask now is “can you print a gun?”)
Another commonality is the time elapsed between the arrival of these technologies and when they went mainstream. The foundations of modern computers – ENIAC, Von Neumann architecture – were invented 30 years before the home computer went mainstream. The Internet’s foundations – packet switching, APRANET – were invented 30 years before the Internet went mainstream. The precursor of the 3D printer – Rapid Prototyping – came to the industrial market 30 years before the 3D printer went mainstream. Incidentally, that that was the same year the “replicator” appeared in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
