Ask most people to picture the first Internet of Things device and they imagine something sleek: a smart speaker, a fitness band, a Wi-Fi thermostat. The real answer is far more ordinary and far more charming. The first internet-connected appliance was a Coca-Cola vending machine, wired up by graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University in 1982 so they could check whether it was stocked and cold without leaving their desks. Decades before anyone coined the phrase "Internet of Things," a group of programmers built exactly that: a physical object reporting its real-world status over a network.
A thirsty problem and a clever fix
The computer science department at Carnegie Mellon had a Coke machine on an upper floor, and a community of programmers spread across the building. The problem was simple and universally relatable. You would walk all the way to the machine only to find it empty, or worse, freshly restocked with warm bottles that had not had time to chill. Wasted trips, every day.
So the students did what engineers do. They added micro-switches to sense how many bottles were in each of the machine's six columns, and they tracked how long each bottle had been loaded so they could estimate whether it was cold yet. They wired that sensor data into a department computer connected to ARPANET, the research network that would eventually become the internet. Anyone on the network could now query the machine and get back the stock level of each column plus how long the newest bottles had been cooling.
