obligatory obscure reference

..which was a Commodore C64 with monitor, printer, and *floppy drive*, even. No more sharing the Radio Shack Model 1 Level 2 at school, I could write D&D and Morrow Project character generators to my heart’s content. It was amazingly expensive relative to our other household expenses at the time, I think my dad was making $45K a year or so while he was in the Army and the out-the-door cost of the C64 Kit was around $1200.

For less than that + a few evenings of assembly, I now have my own desktop 3D printer. It’s basically the Altair 8800 of 3D printers, the Makerbot “cupcake”, which is based on the open source Reprap project. It only has as a working envelope of 4″x4″x6″ so I won’t be printing anything huge, and the resolution isn’t good enough for commercial resale. However, it’s going to be trivial to print out small objects for test purposes while doing design/fabrication projects or creating structural elements for other 3D projects.

Say “Hello” to Cupcake #235:

(I stained and sealed it before assembly, it shows up as unfinished birch plywood.)

[tags]makerbot, reprap[/tags]