[ih] History of IoT

[Brian E Carpenter]

Semantics question: are you asking about *Internet* of things, or
*network* of things?

Networks of things go back to the early 1970s at least**. I worked
in process control then and one of the things we were controlling
was the (original) CERN proton synchrotron. A few years later
we put microprocessors in distributed CAMAC crates and controlled
things by the hundreds.

But if it's strictly *Internet*, it couldn't predate 1/1/1983,
could it?

** You could make a case that SAGE was a network of things, starting
in about 1958.

Regards
    Brian Carpenter

On 14-Feb-23 10:20, 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.
>>
>> Well the term 'toaster' actually came from the C89 standard work. It
>> was the crude term we used to discuss a cheap embedded device [if you
>> look at the standard C actually has two ways of being deployed -
>> hosted or embedded - but that's not the discussion here].  I also
>> suspect many of those people don't know about/had little first hand
>> experience with BLISS/ESPOL/BCPL etc - which all predated B and C as
>> they were 1960s/1970s technologies - plus few places other than
>> CMU/MIT/Standford would have had 'free' PDP-11 cycles for a hack like
>> that give the cost of the systems at those times (IIRC - the Coke
>> machine ran off the original CS Front-End)
>>
>> I think IoT community picked up the term Toaster from the C89 work and
>> frankly, many folks were ignorant of the work that predated it when
>> using $10-$30K Minicomputers, much less the $.5K-$1K microcomputers of
>> the 1970s.  Also remember the per host for an IMP connection in the
>> 1970s was huge - in the order of $100K-$150K / yr for each host [paid
>> for as part of your Arpa contract].
>   From my scrounging around, it seems that the toaster debuted at the
> 1990 Interop to big fanfare and called the first internet of things
> example, even though that phrase didn't come until later and seemingly
> ignores the coke machine guys which I really don't understand. But all
> of these definitions are rather fuzzy. LSI/11's were used extensively
> for controlling and monitoring stuff, but were they "embedded"? They ran
> standard off the shelf DEC OS's (and Unix, I think), so that's not
> exactly what I think of as embedded.
>>
>>
>>      My personal stake -- and the reason for my curiosity -- is that I
>>      designed the software for an ethernet enabled laser printer in the
>>      mid
>>      80's which is very likely to be the first (I'd be happy to hear
>>      otherwise) for a printer.
>>
>> Hmmmm - the printers at CMU/Stanford/MIT et al were networked in the
>> late 1970s. Also remember of course the network at PARC were also.
>> In fact, my own introduction to TCP was when we were working on the
>> CMU distributed Front-End. It had been originally moved from the
>> single 11/20 [which ran the Coke machine] to a 'network of LSI-11 on a
>> 3M Xerox ethernet.  I was part of the group trying to move the system
>> to bunch of Intel 8086 cards in a multibus.  TCP was still yet to be
>> fully defined. Phil Karn (my Lab partner at the time) had started to
>> play with writing a TCP for his Z80 system - that would eventually
>> become his famous release.  [ We had the RFCs from that work].
> But were they networked with the network stack on the device itself? I
> think that's the distinction. A networked printer could be moved to
> another room without having drag an LSI/11 along with it.
> 
> Mike
>