Before that, the precision available without gearing and feedback wasn't sufficient. There were systems but they were order of magnitude more complicated and several orders more expensive.
I don't think it needed microstepping. The first reprap board bit-banged H-bridges with a PIC, and even later boards only used A3982 drivers. Microstepping helps, but it came later.
You can look at early calibration settings descriptions and they're still talking about e.g. "The number of X stepper-motor steps needed to move 1 mm for the PIC."
Microcontrollers and software for consumer PCs and the like could have been produced, probably, but there are a lot of areas of deep specialization. You'd have had to bring together all sorts of different disciplines and technologies the old, hard way - universities and libraries and researching manually. The internet allowed all of those things to coalesce easily, and novice level people gained access to high quality information and research at the click of a mouse.
The patents, compute, research access, and dozens of other relatively small barriers created a thicket of challenges and no obvious way to reconcile them, even if you had all the right ideas and inspiration. I think the internet would have been needed in order for all those ideas to come together in the right way.
paper printers only needed such accuracy in one axis of motion, and had gearing to provide it.
hard drives use voice coils, a completely different technology. The circuitry that does that evolved and certainly influenced the creation of microstepper controllers: the neat trick they do is treat the stepper motor as a voice coil in between full steps.
I have several 2-axis microscope stages from the 80s/90s that are driven by brushed motors with position feedback, and they are all capable of higher accuracy than any stepper motor I have. The capability was there, it was just pricey.
At the time, hard drives used stepper motors, but didn't use microstepping. Paper printers like the MX-80 used stepper motors too, it's true, but didn't use microstepping either. Gearing makes your step size smaller but adds backlash, so it can be the enemy of precision; position feedback like current inkjet printers use is much more precise.
"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.
Microstepping mostly is just to reduce noise and vibrations.
The motors tend to fall to the nearest full step when loaded hard. Most people I have discussed this with believe there is little resolution gain (if any) past 4x microstepping but it certainly is a lot quieter to use x256.
The Harris campaign raised over a Billion and the word this morning is they're now $20 million in debt.
Amazing how much more effective the "crypto industry" dollar was than the Democratic Party dollar. Perhaps the Democrats should hire some of the crypto people next election.
If you think Apple will obey Trump orders to spy on its users, but that they wouldn't obey Biden/Harris orders to do the same; I think you have an unrealistic view.
the corporate stance is irrelevant: all it takes is one low level schmuck with access and enough police record to be subject to "pressure".
I do think Apple would comply with either administration, but Trump might change the laws enough to make it harder for Apple to protect its system integrity.
Stored water is hardly ever a bad idea; but you can't feasibly store enough for any long term. Articulate what you're planning for: days of no power or weeks of no services at all?
If you're worried now about not being able to trust the government next year; ask yourself why you have been trusting them to this point? Whatever your opinion of them, government at all levels is made of people no better or worse than you, as subject to error and blind obedience.
id say 10g/day minimum and you might plan for 20g if anyone wants to wash hands. If you ever need it, you will be very glad for whatever you have. Even a couple one gallon jugs can make a power interruption or whatever much less stressful.
Rotate or otherwise pay attention to freshness if you want to drink it.
serious nuts do things like put 1,000gal underground cisterns in their water systems. and/or frequently drink from local water streams so as to maintain a tolerance for the local "wild" water.
Even if the Federal "Cognitive Hygiene" efforts continue (mis/disinformation departments), the people running them won't be allowed the free hand they have previously enjoyed in squelching unapproved speech. Publishers will not leap to comply the way they've been doing for 8 years.
lawsuits against the Federal government will have a more receptive audience: lawyers will be more willing to undertake such cases, judges to hear them, the public will be interested in them. The idea that "government is automatically always Good" is being shelved until the next time it's needed. Citizens will again have standing to bring suits.
Antitrust could turn into a big deal, but only if there's some attitude changes in the current big money alliances.
The bigs might sacrifice some of their own in order to insure their own survival. For example, Nvidia might be "too big, too concentrated" but Amazon will be "diverse" enough to be spared.
The FBI has a long, documented history of manufacturing its headline terrorism cases from whole cloth. Not just the recent cases like the Bundy bullshit; all the way back before the Black Panthers.
occam's razor and a complete lack of actual white supremacists on the ground suggests this is another example of same.
