<P> 1984: On 16 July 1984, Alain Le Méhauté, Olivier de Witte, and Jean Claude André filed their patent for the stereolithography process . The application of the French inventors was abandoned by the French General Electric Company (now Alcatel - Alsthom) and CILAS (The Laser Consortium). The claimed reason was "for lack of business perspective". </P> <P> 1984: Three weeks later in 1984, Chuck Hull of 3D Systems Corporation filed his own patent for a stereolithography fabrication system, in which layers are added by curing photopolymers with ultraviolet light lasers . Hull defined the process as a "system for generating three - dimensional objects by creating a cross-sectional pattern of the object to be formed,". Hull's contribution was the STL (Stereolithography) file format and the digital slicing and infill strategies common to many processes today . </P> <P> 1988: The technology used by most 3D printers to date--especially hobbyist and consumer - oriented models--is fused deposition modeling, a special application of plastic extrusion, developed in 1988 by S. Scott Crump and commercialized by his company Stratasys, which marketed its first FDM machine in 1992 . </P> <P> 1993: The term 3D printing originally referred to a powder bed process employing standard and custom inkjet print heads, developed at MIT in 1993 and commercialized by Soligen Technologies, Extrude Hone Corporation, and Z Corporation . </P>

When was the first 3d printer released to the public