The Altair was the next best thing to completely useless if one wasn’t a total geek. That was what made it the perfect microcomputer for the time. Sure, one could always buy/beg time on a mainframe and get ones programs run that way; it was faster, more efficient, and could run a much larger class of programs. But the Altair was something one could *own*.

Own it the geeks of the world did. Owned it, hacked it, and evolved it only to solve the classes of problems they thought were interesting, which was mostly device drivers, programming languages and operating systems.

Eventually, all this interest lead to the Apple and to the other more usable and recognizable modern PCs. Which are *still* on the hard-to-use side relative to a refrigerator or a toaster, mind you, but this doesn’t stop nearly everyone in the developed world from owning or using one.

What you see as the disadvantages or shortcomings of RepRap, I see as its major promise. It is appealing only to geeks; perfect! Hard to use? That’s a synonym for “hackable” in this case. Being developed with the intention of tackling an elegant but functionally useless problem? Again, things couldn’t be better; how else to engage the talents of hundreds to thousands of the smartest people on the planet?

Here’s a slightly modified sentence from your post:

“I love the idea of downloading the text for whatever book I want, but I still don’t think I’m going to print the vast majority of things I read.”

and again, this time an exact quote:

“As an analogy, anyone can now print a book on their laser printer, yet we still buy bulk-printed books.”

Exactly so! A laser printer is not a printing press. It is a vastly more powerful and liberating technology than that.

Similarly, we have no idea what the killer app for RepRaps is going to be. My guess? Customizing action figures. But it could be anything; as long as the geeks are left alone to develop their nifty toy into the most awesomest nifty toy they can make, it will become, over time, even more awesome; useful will be a side effect of this, as always.

Sorry I missed you before you left for Denmark; hopefully we can catch up before Hong Kong.