When I worked computer sales in retail in 1995, I would frequently have people come up and ask me during a sale or some such nonsense: "What would I use this thing for?" Usually it went a little like this:
* Do you write letters or papers?
* Kids who write papers?
* Interested in looking on the internet? No?
* Have a college kid who is on the internet? (do you know what email is?) No?
* Play games? (fairly rare) No?
* Keep track of finances? Don't want to do that?
At this point I just kind of shrugged my shoulders. Outside of some attempts to explain that computers were something good to learn about (in particular for kids), it was a pretty hard sell.
Probably over 50% of the time they asked that question - "What is this thing good for?", I knew where we would end up.
before the internet computers were pretty much useless, except for things like visicalc and wordstar. Besides basic office duties they were useless in the home, except to geeks who didn't mind pecking out simple programs that were forgotten when the machine powered down (or often before!)
Then the models got speeds beyond 2400 baud and netcom and such sprang up and suddenly in the home computers did a little more. There was gopher and nntp and email and you could poke around in the shell accounts for hours of fun. Finally mosaic became nutscrape and the web exploded and suddenly everyone and everything had a "home page". Things looked touch and go for a while as AOL tried to ruin it, but they went poof with their time warner friends around the turn of the century and couldn't (like many companies, including excite) figure out if they were a media or tech company. Thankfully around that time windows was getting a proper tcpip stack and we didn't need to be nerds and figure out winsock settings anymore. Then, and not really until then, were computers viable for regular people at home (no excite pun intended.) there was games (ms flight sim for example) and proper word processing packages, even quark express for "DTP" and there was an embryonic web, bbs, the well, aol, yahoo, pointcast...
I could probably build a 3D printer from scratch, controller, actuators, and all, and I still ask myself the "What is this thing good for?" question.
Okay, sarcasm aside, it looks like these things are finally starting to slowly crack the door open on the realm of real-world usability. This realization dawned on me when I figured that some parts of the quadcopter I've been toiling over in recent days, might as well be 3D printed: the battery holder, maybe the motor mounts, etc. Gimbal parts would be pretty easy too.
And it dawned on me again yesterday, during SpaceX's dog and pony show for the Dragon 2, when they showed the 3D printed rocket engines.
That's precisely what makes me so excited about them (and physical computing in general). The next Jobs/Woz team is working on that stuff right now and it seems as weird to the layperson as PCs did back when the Berkley Homebrew Club was doing its thing.
Comments
Not surprising though that they thought this.
When I worked computer sales in retail in 1995, I would frequently have people come up and ask me during a sale or some such nonsense: "What would I use this thing for?" Usually it went a little like this:
* Do you write letters or papers?
* Kids who write papers?
* Interested in looking on the internet? No?
* Have a college kid who is on the internet? (do you know what email is?) No?
* Play games? (fairly rare) No?
* Keep track of finances? Don't want to do that?
At this point I just kind of shrugged my shoulders. Outside of some attempts to explain that computers were something good to learn about (in particular for kids), it was a pretty hard sell.
Probably over 50% of the time they asked that question - "What is this thing good for?", I knew where we would end up.
before the internet computers were pretty much useless, except for things like visicalc and wordstar. Besides basic office duties they were useless in the home, except to geeks who didn't mind pecking out simple programs that were forgotten when the machine powered down (or often before!)
Then the models got speeds beyond 2400 baud and netcom and such sprang up and suddenly in the home computers did a little more. There was gopher and nntp and email and you could poke around in the shell accounts for hours of fun. Finally mosaic became nutscrape and the web exploded and suddenly everyone and everything had a "home page". Things looked touch and go for a while as AOL tried to ruin it, but they went poof with their time warner friends around the turn of the century and couldn't (like many companies, including excite) figure out if they were a media or tech company. Thankfully around that time windows was getting a proper tcpip stack and we didn't need to be nerds and figure out winsock settings anymore. Then, and not really until then, were computers viable for regular people at home (no excite pun intended.) there was games (ms flight sim for example) and proper word processing packages, even quark express for "DTP" and there was an embryonic web, bbs, the well, aol, yahoo, pointcast...
this is pretty much how my conversations go when I tell people that I want to buy a 3d printer.
I could probably build a 3D printer from scratch, controller, actuators, and all, and I still ask myself the "What is this thing good for?" question.
Okay, sarcasm aside, it looks like these things are finally starting to slowly crack the door open on the realm of real-world usability. This realization dawned on me when I figured that some parts of the quadcopter I've been toiling over in recent days, might as well be 3D printed: the battery holder, maybe the motor mounts, etc. Gimbal parts would be pretty easy too.
And it dawned on me again yesterday, during SpaceX's dog and pony show for the Dragon 2, when they showed the 3D printed rocket engines.
That's precisely what makes me so excited about them (and physical computing in general). The next Jobs/Woz team is working on that stuff right now and it seems as weird to the layperson as PCs did back when the Berkley Homebrew Club was doing its thing.