The history of IoT

DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) created and launched ARPANET, the forerunner to the public Internet that we know and use today.

Commercial service providers made ARPANET accessible to the general public. Satellites and landlines enabled the basic communications required for the first IoT solutions.

Programmers at Carnegie Mellon University connected a Coca-Cola vending machine to the internet, allowing users to check if the machine had cold sodas before making a purchase. It is considered one of the earliest IoT applications.

John Romkey successfully linked a toaster to the Internet and was able to turn it on and off remotely, bringing us even closer to what we consider contemporary IoT devices.

Upholding the now well-established tradition of using the internet to monitor food and applications, engineers at the University of Cambridge created a system that snaps photographs of a coffee maker three times per minute, enabling workers to monitor it from a distance. It was similar to an early version of a webcam.

Location services were first introduced by the U.S. government’s GPS satellite program which went fully operational in 1995. Many of today’s IoT devices are defined by location services.

More devices can now connect to the internet due to the draft standardisation of IPv6, which is the successor of IPv4. IPv4 (with its 32-bit structure) can support 4.3 billion devices, while IPv6 (a 128-bit upgrade) can support up to 340 undecillion devices or 2129 unique IDs.

1999 was a significant year due to the term “Internet of Things” being officially used by Kevin Ashton, the director of MIT’s Auto-ID labs. He used it to demonstrate the possibilities of RFID tracking technology to Procter & Gamble executives.

The internet refrigerator, one of the most iconic IoT applications, was introduced by LG in 2000. Although it had panels and monitors to assist in tracking your fridge’s content, it wasn’t well received by customers due to the cost being more than $20,000.

The term “Internet of Things” began to appear in book titles and sporadic media reports. In 2007, the release of the first iPhone introduced a new way for the general population to interact with the internet.

Switzerland’s Zurich hosts the inaugural worldwide Internet of Things conference. The year is significant because it was the first in which the number of internet-connected devices surpassed the planet’s population.

Bitcoin launches, marking the beginning of blockchain technology which will likely play a significant role in functionalities such as smart contracts and leveraging data.

IoT was identified by the Chinese government as a critical technology and included in their long-term growth strategy. The “smart home” concept started being popular in 2010, the same year Nest introduced a smart thermostat that learns the user’s daily routine or habits and automatically adjusts the house temperature.

Gartner’s “hype cycle” report compares the popularity of technologies with the potential of long-term utility. In 2011, IoT was included in the report for the first time.

The release of Google Glass was a major advancement in wearable and Internet of Things technology, however, its introduction was somewhat premature as it wasn’t utilised by the masses.

The launch of Amazon’s Echo makes an entry into the market of smart home hubs. In other news, the formation of an industrial IoT standards consortium exemplifies how the IoT can alter a wide range of manufacturing and supply chain operations.

In 2016, Uber, Lyft, Tesla, and General Motors all conducted self-driving vehicle testing. 2016 also marked the first significant IoT malware attack in which the Mirai botnet infected IoT devices using manufacturer-default logins, taking control, and using them to DDoS well-known websites.