"cheap consumer paper printers and hard drives" was not a 1970s thing.
I mean, towards the end of the decade was something like the ImageWriter, which let you do bitmapped graphics, as a row of 9 dots at a time. At https://www.folklore.org/Thunderscan.html?sort=date you can read about the difficulties of turning it into a scanner. (Like, 'We could almost double the speed if we scanned in both directions, but it was hard to get the adjacent scan lines that were scanned in opposite directions to line up properly.')
The LaserWriter wasn't until 1985 or so. My first hard drive, 30 MB, was a present from my parents around 1987.
By the 1996, laser-based 3D printing based on cutting out layers of paper was a thing, available for general use in one of the computing labs in the university building where I worked.
The result smelled like burnt wood.
When I visited a few years later they had switched to some other technology, and one which could be colored, but I forgot what.
The Thunderscan, for the time, was pretty awesome though. I remember borrowing one from a classmate to make some scans. Given how we keep a document scanner in our pocket these days, the whole notion of sticking a scanner into a printer seems so antiquated and kinda crazy.
I mean, towards the end of the decade was something like the ImageWriter, which let you do bitmapped graphics, as a row of 9 dots at a time. At https://www.folklore.org/Thunderscan.html?sort=date you can read about the difficulties of turning it into a scanner. (Like, 'We could almost double the speed if we scanned in both directions, but it was hard to get the adjacent scan lines that were scanned in opposite directions to line up properly.')
The LaserWriter wasn't until 1985 or so. My first hard drive, 30 MB, was a present from my parents around 1987.
By the 1996, laser-based 3D printing based on cutting out layers of paper was a thing, available for general use in one of the computing labs in the university building where I worked.
The result smelled like burnt wood.
When I visited a few years later they had switched to some other technology, and one which could be colored, but I forgot what.