A better Internet of Things through open source culture

The Internet of Things (IoT) isn’t a new idea. The term was supposedly coined by Kevin Ashton at Procter & Gamble in 1999, but the concept goes back to at least the 1980s. An Internet-connected coke machine at Carnegie Mellon University (1982) and a Scientific American piece by Mark Weiser (1991) are often cited as part of Iot’s early history. Consumer gimmicks like self-refilling refrigerators were talked up during the original dot-com boom. Of course, various forms of industrial sensors and data logging devices go back even further. However, IoT as a coherent category of products, software, and services that not yet coalesced.