[ih] History of IoT

[Guy Almes]

Mike, Clem, et al.,
   Check out <https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt> for the truth.
   This shows the slipperiness of the IoT idea.
   The original CMU CS Coke machine hack was a very clever early-70s 
hardware/software hack motivated by the principle that if a hardworking 
CS grad student was going to spend 10 cents on a coke, s/he deserved a 
cold one.  So, with an old-fashioned coke machine with columns of coke 
bottles, which column would have cold cokes.
   So the original hack was a program running on the PDP-10 system that 
anyone in the department had an account on, creatively referred to as 
CMUA.  You'd access it by typing the command:
	r coke
from the TOPS-10 command line.

   Clearly not yet an example of the IoT.
   Then, at some point in the late 1970s, Ivor Durham (a wonderful CS 
grad student from England) used the finger program (a wonderful 
contribution by Les Earnest) allow someone at another site to type 
something like:
	finger coke at cmua
This is still ARPAnet time and finger would then find out the status of 
the CMU coke machine from any ARPAnet site, but the motivation was 
clearly for users on the CMU hosts other than CMUA.
   So you could interrogate the coke machine from anywhere on the 
ARPAnet, but still probably not IoT.

   The final step in having the coke machine itself be an Internet host 
occurred much later, probably about 1990, after the old-fashioned coke 
machine with its columns of coke bottles was gone.
   But this was clearly IoT, but equally clearly not among the first such.

   BTW, one minor piece of evidence of how the coke machine was 
integrated into the culture of CMU-CS relates to an early "star trek" 
type program that one could play in the terminal room.  The screen would 
display the bridge of an imaginary space ship.  The number of games that 
the 'user' had played in the current session was indicated by the number 
of empty coke bottles displayed on the bridge, with wins on one side and 
losses on the other.  A subtle hint that the now-fully-cafenated grad 
student should get back to work.
   Ah, the sociology of the terminal room!

	-- Guy

On 2/13/23 4:20 PM, Michael Thomas via Internet-history wrote:
> On 2/13/23 12:53 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 13, 2023 at 3:01 PM Michael Thomas via Internet-history 
>> <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>
>>     Hi all,
>>
>>     I've been trying to understand the history of what we'd now call the
>>     Internet of Things. I know about the internet coke machine which
>>     was in
>>     about 1983 and then the internet toaster in around 1990. 
>>
>> FWIW - The CMU Coke machine was in the mid 1970s and was the Arpanet 
>> before the Internet - so you are missing at least 8-10 years. It was 
>> definitely running in '76, but I think was earlier than that - Guy 
>> Alms who was there a few years before me, probably remembers when Jim 
>> Teter did the original hack (in PDP-11 assembler and BLISS BTW]..
> What I've seen is that it was 83, but maybe they are just talking
> post-flag day.
>>
>> ...
> 
> Mike
> 
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