Remember when there was a market for only 5 computers in the world, then a few thousand appeared in governments, huge corporations, and a few big R&D labs, then suddenly along came the PC, and there were millions of them in our homes, then hundreds of millions of “devices” in our pockets, seemingly almost overnight?

It is happening again.

Coming to a desk near you is the personal machinist, the 3-D printer that will do for small scale manufacturing what the PC did for personal information management and communication. 

This post from Mitch Joel has a link to a video interview of Chris Anderson on his new book “Makers – The new industrial revolution”  which should blow away a few intellectual cobwebs.

Theo Jansen whose Kinetic models have been a youtube hit has had miniatures produced, working models of astonishing intricacy produced by Shapeways technology, one of the revolutionaries.

This stuff is coming to a desk near you, soon, and the only limitation is your imagination.