[ih] History of IoT

[Jack Haverty]

My suspect for early IOT involving a bunch of "things" communicating 
over a network would be GM's MAP systems back in the early/mid 80s.   
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Automation_Protocol Only 
big organizations with deep pockets could afford a large bunch of 
"things" to talk amongst themselves.

Of course that work was based on Token Bus rather than Ethernet LANs, 
and ISO protocols rather than TCP.   Not the best choices as history has 
shown, and MAP/TOP seems to have faded away.  So maybe it doesn't 
qualify as an "Internet Of Things".

Jack

On 2/13/23 16:32, Guy Almes via Internet-history wrote:
> 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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