Brief history of the Internet of Things

Even before the global computer network was launched forty-five years ago, there were visions of growing intelligent, communicative objects. As the Internet has grown to connect all the intelligent signals (i.e. software) around the world, a number of other terms associated with the idea and practice of connecting everything to everything have emerged, including machine-to-machine (M2M), radio frequency identification (RFID), intelligently controlled sensors, ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things. Here are some milestones in the evolution of the physical with the digital.

1932 Jay B. Nash writes in Spectatoritis: "Within our grasp is the leisure of the Greek citizen, made possible by our mechanical slaves, who outnumber his twelve to the free man's fifteen. When we enter a room, the push of a button lights our way. Another slave sits at our thermostat twenty-four hours a day, regulating the heat of our home. Another sits day and night at our refrigerator, controlling the food. They start our cars, run our engines, shine our shoes and worship our hair. They virtually abolish time and space by their very lightness".

On 13 January 1946, the 2-Way Radio wristwatch, worn by Dick Tracy, makes its first appearance and becomes one of the most recognisable icons of the comic strip.

January 13, 1946, the 2-Way Radio wristwatch, worn as a wristwatch by Dick Tracy, makes its first appearance and becomes one of the most recognisable icons of the comic strip.

1949 The Bar Code is conceived when 27-year-old Norman Joseph Woodland draws four lines in the sand on a Miami beach. Woodland, who later became an IBM engineer, received (with Bernard Silver) the first patent for a linear bar code in 1952. More than twenty years later, another IBM member, George Laurer, was one of the first responsible for implementing its use in supermarkets.

1955 Edward O. Thorp conceives the first portable computer, an analogue device the size of a cigarette packet, used for the sole purpose of predicting roulette wheels. Developed with the help of Claude Shannon, it was tested in Las Vegas in the summer of 1961, but its existence is revealed only in 1966.

October 4, 1960 Morton Heilig receives a patent for the first head-mounted display.

1967 Hubert Upton invents a portable computer with analogue display mounted on glasses to aid in lip-reading.

October 29, 1969, the first message is sent over the ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet.

January 23, 1973 Mario Cardullo receives the first patent for a passive read/write RFID tag.

June 26, 1974 A Universal Product Code (UPC) tag is used to manage purchases in a supermarket for the first time.

1977 CC Collins develops an aid to the blind, for five pounds a laptop with a head-mounted camera capable of converting images into a tactile grid on a waistcoat.

1980 The first members of the Carnegie-Mellon Computer Science department install micro-switches on the Coca-Cola vending machine and connect them to the departmental computer PDP-10 so that they could see on their computer terminals how many bottles were present in the machine and whether their temperature was optimal.

1981 Although still in high school, Steve Mann develops a "portable lighting and personal imaging computer system kit". Backpack-portable

1990 Olivetti develops an active badge system, using infrared signals to communicate a person's location.

September 1991 Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC publishes "The Computer in the 21st Century" in Scientific American, uses the terms "ubiquitous computing" and "augmented virtuality" to describe his vision of how "specialised hardware and software elements, connected by wires, radio waves and infrared, will be so ubiquitous that no one will be aware of their presence".

1993 MIT's Thad Starner begins using a specially rigged computer and heads-up display as a laptop.

1993 Columbia University's Steven Feiner, Blair MacIntyre, and Dorée Seligmann develop Augmented Reality based on KARMA. KARMA overlays circuit diagrams and instructions with repairability.

1994 Xerox Europarc's Mik Lamming and Mike Flynn demonstrate Forget-Me-Not, a handheld device that communicates via wireless transmitters and records interactions with people and devices, then stores the information in a database.

1994 Steve Mann develops a portable wireless webcam, considered the first example of lifelogging.

September 1994 the term "tactile" is used for the first time by B. N. Schilit and M. M. Theimer in "The dissemination of active display information for mobiles," Network, vol. 8, No. 5.

1995 Siemens sets up a specialised department within its mobile phone business unit to develop and implement a GSM data module called "M1" (M2M) for industrial machine-to-machine applications, enabling machines to communicate over wireless networks. The first M1 module was used for point-of-sale (POS) terminals, vehicle telematics, remote monitoring and tracking and tracing applications.

December 1995 Negroponte and MIT's Neil Gershenfeld write in "Wearable Computing" in Wired: "For the hardware and software to track you comfortably around you, they must merge into softwear. The time gap between cockamamie ideas and shipped products is shrinking rapidly, within a week".

13-14 October 1997, Carnegie-Mellon, MIT, and Georgia Tech co-host the first IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, in Cambridge, MA.

1999 the Auto-ID (Automatic Identification) Centre is established at MIT. Sanjay Sarma, David Brock and Kevin Ashton turned RFID into a network technology by linking objects to the Internet via the RFID tag.

1999 Neil Gershenfeld writes: "Beyond trying to make computers everywhere, you have to try to make them.... unobtrusive. For all the coverage of the growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web, a much bigger change comes when the number of things the user has at his or her fingertips is greater than the number of people. The real promise of connected computers is to liberate people, by embedding the means to solve problems in the things around us".

1 January 2001 David Brock, co-director of MIT's Auto-ID Center, writes in a white paper entitled "The Electronic Product Code (EPC): A Material Object Naming Scheme": "For more than twenty-five years, the Universal Product Code (UPC or "bar code") has helped streamline payment and retail inventory processes.... To take advantage of the [Internet] infrastructure, a new object identification scheme, the Electronic Product Code (EPC), is proposed, uniquely identifying objects and facilitating the tracking of the entire product life cycle".

18 March 2002 Chana Schoenberger and Bruce Upbin publish "Internet of Things" in Forbes. They quote Kevin Ashton of MIT's Auto-ID Center: "We need an internet of things, a standardised way for computers to understand the real world."

April 2002 Jim Waldo writes in the Journal of Information Systems Frontiers: ".... The Internet is becoming the communication fabric for devices to communicate to services, which in turn talk to other services. Humans are rapidly becoming a minority on the Internet, and the constituencies of the majority are computational entities that are interacting with other computing entities without human intervention. "

June 2002 Glover Ferguson, chief scientist at Accenture, writes in Harvard Business Review: "It is no exaggeration to say that a small label may one day become its own business. And that day may not be far off".

January 2003 Bernard Traversat in Proceedings of the 36th Annual International Conference on Systems Science in Hawaii, writes: "The JXTA open source project was initiated a year ago to specify a standard set of ad hoc, ubiquitous, peer-to-peer computing protocols as the foundation for the coming Web of Things."

October 2003 Sean Dodson writes in The Guardian: "Last month, a network already capable of connecting many of the millions of tags already in the world (and billions more on their way) was launched at the McCormick Place conference centre on the shores of Lake Michigan. Around 1,000 delegates from retailers around the world, technology and academia gathered for the launch of the Electronic Product Code (EPC) network. Their goal was to replace the global barcode with a universal system that can provide a unique number for every object in the world. Some have already started calling this network the 'internet of things'.

August 2004 science fiction writer Bruce Sterling introduced the concept of "spime" in SIGGRAPH, and described it as "a neologism for an imaginary object that is still virtual. A spime also has a kind of person who makes and uses it, that kind of person is a 'Wrangler.' ... The most important thing to know about Spimes is that they are precisely in space and time. They have histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with a history. In the future, the life of an object begins on a graphic screen. It is born digital. Its design specifications accompany it throughout its life. It is inseparable from that original digital model, which governs the material world. This object is going to tell you - if you ask it - everything an expert would tell you about it. Because it wants you to be an expert.

September 2004 G. Lawton writes: "There are far more machine-like things with mechanical, electrical, electronic or property¬ in the world than there are people. And an increasing number of machines are networked.... M2M is based on the idea that a machine has more value when it is networked and that the network becomes more valuable when machines are connected.

October 2004 Neil Gershenfeld, Raffi Krikorian and Danny Cohen write in "The Internet of Things" in Scientific American: "Giving everyday objects the ability to connect to a data network would have a number of advantages: making it easier for homeowners to configure their lights and switches, reducing the cost and complexity of building construction, helping with medical care in the home. Many alternative standards now compete to do just that, a situation reminiscent of the early days of the Internet, when computers and networks came in multiple incompatible types.

25 October 2004 Robert Weisman writes in the Boston Globe: "The latest vision, hatched in university labs at MIT and Berkeley in the 1990s, is an 'Internet of Things' that links tens of thousands of mesh networks via sensors. They monitor cargo in shipping containers, air ducts in hotels, fish in refrigerated trucks, and lighting and heating in homes and industrial plants. However, the nascent sensor industry faces several hurdles, including the need for a network standard that can encompass the diversity of its applications, competition from other wireless standards, security concerns during transmission of corporate data, and some of the same privacy issues that have dogged other emerging technologies.

2005 A team of faculty members at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) in Ivrea, Italy, develops Arduino, an inexpensive and easy-to-use microcontroller board, for their students to use in developing interactive projects. Adrian McEwen and Hakim Cassamally on the design of the Internet of Things: "Combined with an extension of the software environment, they produced a major impact on the world of physical computing".

November 2005 The International Telecommunication Union publishes the seventh in its series of reports on the Internet, entitled "The Internet of Things."

June 22, 2009 Kevin Ashton writes in "That 'Internet of Things' thing" in RFID Journal: "I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the phrase 'Internet of Things' began its life as the title of a presentation I made at Procter & Gamble (P&G) in 1999. Linking the new idea of RFID in P&G's supply chain with the then red-hot topic of the Internet was more than just a nice way to get executive attention. It encapsulated an important insight where 10 years later, after the Internet of Things has become the title of everything from an article in Scientific American to the name of a European Union conference, it is still often misunderstood.