Digitizing the Edge: IoT Makes Good on the Promise of a Modified Coke Machine | Sensors Magazine
IoT is a term that dates to as early as 1982. What we now know as IoT was first understood to be simply a network of smart devices. A modified Coke machine at Carnegie Mellon University was the first Internet-connected appliance, capable of taking its own inventory and reporting whether newly loaded drinks were cold.
Writing in IEEE Spectrum in 1994, Reza Rajiin more precisely described IoT as “moving small packets of data to a large set of nodes, to integrate and automate everything from home appliances to entire factories.” The term “Internet of things” was likely coined by Kevin Ashton of Procter & Gamble, later MIT’s Auto-ID Center, as early as in 1999.