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It was the end of a three-day binge of invention in March 2009. Bre Pettis, Zach Hoeken Smith and Adam Mayer had locked themselves in a bare cement room in Downtown Brooklyn pretty much around the clock. No one was hollering Eureka; they had to chase screws that rolled under the table.
They were building a three-dimensional printer, a machine that works like an inkjet printer except that it squirts molten plastic, not ink. The layers of plastic rise into almost any shape — bolts, tools, toys — based on digital models sent to the printer from a computer.
“We were making a machine that makes things,” Mr. Pettis said. “We’d say to people: ‘Right now, you can download books and movies. Someday you’re going to be able to download things.’ ”
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To be fair, they didn’t actually “invent” this 3D printer…they took the open source RepRap project, re-skinned it and commercialized it. I’m not saying that it wasn’t a lot of work to do so or that they haven’t made some upgrades along the way, but it certainly seems that they aren’t necessarily giving attribution to the project & team whose shoulders they stood upon to get where they are.
@ruffus – that’s not true. the makerbot team always credits – what a journalist puts in isn’t always what the interviewees say, or the journalist just leave it out to make the article more “interesting”.
To be fair, they didn’t actually “invent” this 3D printer…they took the open source RepRap project, re-skinned it and commercialized it. I’m not saying that it wasn’t a lot of work to do so or that they haven’t made some upgrades along the way, but it certainly seems that they aren’t necessarily giving attribution to the project & team whose shoulders they stood upon to get where they are.
@ruffus – that’s not true. the makerbot team always credits – what a journalist puts in isn’t always what the interviewees say, or the journalist just leave it out to make the article more “interesting”.