Carnegie Mellon's 1982 Coke Machine Was the World's First IoT Device

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Graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University created the world's first internet-connected device in 1982 — a Coca-Cola vending machine rigged with sensors to report stock levels and bottle temperatures remotely. The students added micro-switches to each column of the machine and fed that data into a department computer linked to ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet. The motivation was practical: avoiding wasted trips to a machine that was either empty or stocked with warm, unchilled bottles. This makeshift system embodied every core element of a modern IoT device — physical sensors, data translation, network transmission, and remote querying. The concept predated Kevin Ashton's coining of the term 'Internet of Things' by approximately 17 years, as well as the World Wide Web and today's low-cost wireless microcontrollers.

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