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bawng t1_iu4haor wrote

I can't read the article because of paywall, but industrial robots have been a thing for roughly 85 years or so (1937 according to a quick googling), so I'm actually surprised there's only a few million of them.

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darth_nadoma OP t1_iu4nkog wrote

Weren’t they invented in 1956?

Until relatively recently technology was too immature and expensive and human labor was too cheap for them to be used en masse.

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bawng t1_iu4w96m wrote

> The earliest known industrial robot, conforming to the ISO definition was completed by "Bill" Griffith P. Taylor in 1937 and published in Meccano Magazine, March 1938. The crane-like device was built almost entirely using Meccano parts, and powered by a single electric motor.

Yeah I probably read a bit too quickly. 1937 was just the first robot that met the ISO definition, but it was not a real industrial robot.

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