Computation for the printer was possible, but home computing definitely was not there enough to let someone model something up in fusion 360 like we think of today. That was the realm of srs workstations like the ones SGI made.
I don't think that's a show stopper though. If we had had 3D printers in the 1970's and 1980's,
sold at Sears, between the computers and the tools, you'd bring home a paper catalog from the 3d model company, thumb through it for models you wanted to build, send off a cheque (and a SASE) and they'd mail you back a cartridge that you plug into your printer so you can print that model. And then get that catalog in the mail forever after.
As reference on how much home computing power was available back then, the original Apple I came out in 1976 with a "character generator" and was not capable of advanced graphics - the cost of the amount of ram it would take to draw an entire screen from ram would have been astronomical, so characters were stored in ram and the card was in charge of outputting the characters and rudimentary graphics.
> That was the realm of srs workstations like the ones SGI made
Not exact. First, funny note, Seymour Cray admit, he used Macintosh to design Cray.
Second, existed activity of using Atari ST for 3D design, as sort of companion machine for special model of Commodore, which could process analog video. As I seen, they directly write frame-by-frame on Betacam.
Sure, rendering on ST with 68k was slow even with TV resolution, but they made lot of commercials on TV.
In late 90s, TV commercials made on MMX or Pentium-Pro with 16..32mb of RAM, and use PC frame grabber cards and RAID HDD. And that's history, how SGI become bankrupt - just when Maya was ported to x86 this become end.
I agree that you couldn't have done Fusion 360 on an Apple ][ or a Compaq Deskpro 386. But see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42087099 for my notes on what kind of 3-D graphics you could have done on hobbyist computers of that time period and how we actually did do 2-D CAD on them.
I don't think that's a show stopper though. If we had had 3D printers in the 1970's and 1980's, sold at Sears, between the computers and the tools, you'd bring home a paper catalog from the 3d model company, thumb through it for models you wanted to build, send off a cheque (and a SASE) and they'd mail you back a cartridge that you plug into your printer so you can print that model. And then get that catalog in the mail forever after.
As reference on how much home computing power was available back then, the original Apple I came out in 1976 with a "character generator" and was not capable of advanced graphics - the cost of the amount of ram it would take to draw an entire screen from ram would have been astronomical, so characters were stored in ram and the card was in charge of outputting the characters and rudimentary graphics.