This is quite cool: Fab at Home, Open-Source 3D Printer, Lets Users Make Anything

A Fab at Home kit costs around $2400. Lipson compares it to early kit computers such as the MITS Altair 8800, which democratized computer technology in the 1970s. At-home fabrication, Lipson says, “is a revolution waiting to happen.” As for that robot? Wait a year, he says, and it really will walk out of the machine.

Here is their homepage:  Fab@Home

So, while we may not be making our chicken soup in a fabber anytime soon, how about a replacement flashlight...or a toaster [my toaster just gave up the ghost this morning].  Download the plans, pour in the raw material, switch the machine on, snap the finished parts together, plug in the wall and toast bread.

We've got a ways to go.

Back in the day famous people were quoted as saying the wildest things such as:

There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.
- Ken Olson (President of Digital Equipment Corporation) at the Convention of the World Future Society in Boston in 1977

And then came the pc revolution.

Others have said likewise wildly innacurate prophesies:

Computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1 1/2 tons.
- Popular Mechanics, 1949

And then came the fab/lab revolution.

Are we now on the cusp of a new generation of technology, one that may have as significant an impact on society as the computer has had? Will it result in what we expect?

There is now a hobbyist priced fab lab that you can build in your own home. Check it out. [Fab@Home].

The estimated cost of making one of your own fab labs at home is $2,300. No precisely-machined-micrometer-lathe-turned parts required, this is apparently all possible with off-the-shelf parts.

The FabLab@Home project has been compared to the Altair 8800 which was the first computer you could build at home from a kit. [linky]

Economies of Abundance

This has many repurcussions. If you can make what you want when you want then the product of value becomes the plans on how to make it. The information. The transition from an industrial economy to an information economy shifts even further into the realm of data supremecy.