Hello, I'm Dave, and I've been around since mini-computers were as big as refrigerators and had to be booted up (I am not kidding) by setting address/data switches on the front panel so that the computer would know where to start executing. It was old technology at the time, but they were still in use where I was going to school. I'm still in the same industry, but now it's Java realtime and quad core processors, instead of wire-wrapped backplanes and magnetic core memory.

I have a Makergear M2 printer for practical reasons and for play. On the software front, I've been using Simplify3D Creator and Repetier-Host/Slic3r for model prep, slicing and g-code creation, and a number of modeling tools and utilities depending on what i'm doing (FreeCAD, Blender, OpenSCAD, MeshMixer).

I remember (geezer alert) when the music industry came down hard on some private citizens who were trading music online. Not making money with it but, according to the industry, taking money away from them through lost sales. I wonder when manufacturing companies will do the same with 3D printer file trading. I do think at some point examples will be made of people based on copyright infringement and/or theft of intellectual property. For example, one of the more practical items I've made is a LiPo battery tray for an electric helicopter. The manufacturer charges $20 for two of them. My knock-off, using measurements directly from the stock part, cost me 92 cents in plastic. About 25 grams. I thought about publishing the STL on Thingiverse then decided not to because I didn't know what the legal issues were, given that I made my part from measurements of a commercial product. Really unlikely that the company would decide to make me a legal test case, but it's going to happen at some point, to someone. So I decided I'd publish things of my own design, but not anything I reverse engineered or outright copied for my own use.