I’ve been fortunate to witness and take part in some truly groundbreaking innovations as they transitioned into mainstream use. One thing that’s remained remarkably consistent throughout all of it: management was almost never ready—and rarely grasped the full benefits until much later.
My senior year in high school marked the end of an era. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the brand-new K&E slide rule I was so proud of was already on its way to obsolescence. Calculators were coming. College became a transition from slide rule to calculator. When a good calculator cost about the same as a high-end slide rule, history chose its favorite. Slide rules became relics almost overnight.
This shift wasn’t easy for the professors. Many hadn’t updated their tests in years, and suddenly the answers were coming out different. Worse, some of the calculators were programmable, capable of storing entire libraries of formulas. How do you even begin to define cheating in a world like that?
After graduation, I pushed my way into an even bigger revolution: the home computer. I spent a few years as the manager at KA Computer Sales, immersed in selling and assembling computer kits. When the opportunity presented itself, I dove headfirst into the revolution as an engineer at Percom Data Systems. Those years are among my most treasured memories. But eventually, the time came to join a bigger company.
My home computer had only 48K of memory, but the technology was advancing rapidly. Suddenly, the line between work and home was blurring. As an electrical design engineer, I hand-drew schematics on paper and ran calculations on a calculator. My company had a mainframe, but it was reserved for the finance department.
My desk computer
I don’t remember if I was the first but one by one, home computers started appearing on engineers’ desks. That’s when management finally noticed something was changing. We were working faster, more efficiently—but if one of us left, so did our computer. Worse still, we were all using different machines, so anything we left behind was practically useless.
Uncomfortable with this new world, management fell back on old habits. They insisted all the computers be moved into isolated rooms—just like the mainframes had always been. It was how things had always been done. Mainframes needed climate controlled cleanrooms, were leased by CPU cycles and had software pricing out of the dark ages. Personal computers had none of those drawbacks. Putting them all in one room completely erased the advantages of personal machines and demonstrated how out of touch management was.
Mainframe Computer
The mainframe teams saw the writing on the wall and tried to hold the line—offering up spreadsheets, word processors, and more. But it was a losing battle. Mainframes were made for overnight batch processing, not real-time interaction. It took nearly a year before management gave in and finally invested in proper computers and software for our desks.
Of course, the transition wasn’t smooth. Our poor IT person was constantly putting out fires, mostly caused by managers crashing their own machines. And for the engineers, a darker shift was happening. Once managers realized we could generate data and metrics, they replaced informal updates with weekly written reports.
I’ll never admit to using it, but I did have a program that could churn out progress reports using a database of general and project-specific jargon.
I mention all this because I was deeply involved in each of these transitions. And now I see another shift happening—this time with 3D printing. The moment is close when hobbyist-grade machines may start replacing professional ones in more ways than people realize.
Before I retired, I strongly advocated using 3D printing in our company, not for production just yet, but for fab aids, models, and prototypes. It was perfect for that. We had two professional-grade printers, but using them meant jumping through hoops—managerial approval, charge codes and trained operators. Like many engineers, I just printed my items at home and brought them in. If you ever toured the labs I worked in, you’d find countless items I made—signs, custom enclosures, cable routers, and more. I never asked to be reimbursed. I just wanted management to see the possibilities.
Just before I retired, production finally purchased a hobby-grade printer to make fab aids. That was almost the best retirement gift I could have asked for, second only to my 3D retirement award a good friend spent almost a full week printing at home.
I’ve always loved working with younger engineers. They’ve got fresh eyes and open minds, and I always learned something from them. Where I might dismiss an idea based on past failures, they approached it with confidence, often backed by improvements I hadn’t kept up with. And more than once, supported by better tools and technology, their ideas proved successful.
Still when a close friend suggested that every mechanical engineer should have a 3D printer on their desk, my first instinct was skepticism. Then I remembered: I’d heard these same objections before. Management said the same things when I brought my home computer into the office decades ago.
My printer, on my desk above my computer
Today, more companies are demanding 3D model files along with final products. Drawings are becoming passé. Machinists want model files to program their machines. And having a 3D printer means being able to quickly check fit and function—plus the incredible impact of handing someone a physical model during a proposal.
Let’s not forget, we’re not talking about an $80,000 machine anymore. A solid hobby printer costs under $1,000—even with current Trump tariffs—and comes with free software. That’s less than an engineering-grade laptop. And dramatically less than the cost of redesigning a part that doesn’t fit or can’t be fabricated.
I realize that my doubts about giving each mechanical engineer their own 3D printer were only echoes of the objections raised when personal computers started trickling into offices. I’m no longer part of the workforce, but my Bambu Labs printer still gets plenty of use—fixtures, enclosures, even gardening tools for my wife. The technology, accessibility, and price point are finally aligned. Individual 3D printers for each engineer really could change the game.
What’s your opinion?
–3D Dreams on my desk —
© 2025, Byron Seastrunk. All rights reserved.
