The First IoT Device

Who knew that that the first IoT device would be a Coca Cola vending machine? 

On a hot summer day, there are few things that I like more than a cold, satisfying soft drink, and I’m not alone. In 1982, David Nichols, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, got tired of walking to the Coca Cola vending machine only to find that it was out of soda. To his credit, he did say that the Coke machine was “a relatively long way” from his office. 

Leave it to a computer science student to over-engineer a solution. Nichols and a few friends (Mike Kazar, Ivor Durham, and John Zsarnay) installed micro-switches in each of the vending machine slots. The Coke machine was then connected to the departmental server and a simple program was written that could query the switches to determine the day’s current state of soda. By typing “finger coke@cmua” from any machine on the Internet (technically ARPNET at the time), the students were able to determine not only if the vending machine had soda available for purchase, but which button would provide the coldest soda based on the time the bottle had been stocked in the machine. 

Thanks to a student’s search for a caffeine fix, we now have billions of connected coffee pots, electric mixers, stoves, toothbrushes, and cars.