I remember my first 3D printer. It was a self-built RepRap Prusa Mendel, made with a mix of 3D printed parts from both a StrataSys FDM printer and a MakerBot Thing-o-Matic I had access to at my part-time prototyping job. It was a finicky beast, always having problems with extrusion temperatures and belt tensioning. I was able to use it to complete my final project in robotics, printing some simple bracket components for a little rover bot I had designed in Blender (surprisingly the state-of-the-art in open source solid modeling at the time; FreeCAD was still pretty rough when I was in school).
It's a bit sad to see Prusa's business getting eaten up by competition, not least because it seems that they've done a good job of keeping the RepRap project's open source ethos (if not its focus on 3D printed parts) alive.