Hands-On Industrial Internet of Things

History and definition

The IoT as a concept wasn't officially named until 1999. One of the first examples of the IoT was a Coca-Cola machine, located at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the early 1980s. Local programmers would connect through the internet to the refrigerated appliance checking to see if there was a drink available and whether it was cold before making a trip to it.

Kevin Ashton, the Executive Director of Auto-ID Labs at MIT, was the first to describe the IoT in a presentation for Procter and Gamble. During his 1999 speech, Mr. Ashton stated as follows:

“Today, computers, and therefore the Internet, are almost wholly dependent on human beings for information. Nearly all of the roughly 50 petabytes (a petabyte is 1,024 ...