[ih] History of IoT

[Michael Thomas]

On 2/13/23 1:20 PM, Toerless Eckert wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 13, 2023 at 01:01:54PM -0800, Michael Thomas wrote:
>> Was your printer an IoT device? I'd say no: it was just using normal host
>> protocols to do what it did locally in the first place (ie, lpr). And
>> shoe-horning LPRd into the printer itself was painful because lpr expected a
>> disk to buffer everything. As I mentioned, I almost trotted up to ISI
>> because of it.
> [Device  - serial port - computer(device-compute,app-stack/tcp/ip)] - ethernet/Internet
>
> If this [] combination is not an IoT device in your opinion, then i would
> say > 90% of whats today called IoT devices are not IoT devices in your
> definition because they can all be decomposed in some device connected
> via an internal serial/parallel port to some internal "computer" device.

Checking again on the internet coke machine, apparently the sensors were 
backhauled to a main computer which did the networking. Unsurprising for 
1982. According to the article I quote below, they never actually 
updated it to IP, so I guess it's technically true that it wasn't the 
first (though, it's still really important since it showed "gosh lookie 
here, the internet can be used for more than endless email flame wars!"

But yes, if you want to make that the definition you'd be correct but I 
think there's more to it than that. I think IoT implies some amount of 
purpose built to it. The toaster was obviously purpose built. Certainly 
the laser printer I designed was purpose built. The struggles I had with 
lprd were mainly because it was intended to go to a normal host with 
disk, etc not directly to the printer itself. So yeah, I think that's 
different.

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/industries/little-known-story-first-iot-device/

Mike