There is a new acronym to add to the bottomless bowl of alphabet soup that makes up the world of Information Technology. IoT is short for the “Internet of Things.” In the beginning, the only things connected to computer networks were … well, computers. This is no longer the case, with more “things” being connected to the net and so we now have the Internet of Things.
What things, you ask? It might help to start at the very beginning, and that would take us to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Carnegie Mellon University in the early 1980s. It should be easy for everyone to visualize the stereotypical computer nerd: male, overweight, bearded, nearsighted, and hunched over a keyboard 18 hours a day while living on potato chips and soft drinks. One day he pulls himself away from his coding long enough to trudge up three flights of stairs to the Coke machine, only to find it empty. He decides to do something about that. He cobbles together some electrical components, installs them inside the Coke machine and connects it to the building’s computer network. The next time he gets thirsty, and without having to climb three flights of stairs, (in fact without even taking hands off the keyboard) he can contact the Coke machine via the computer network and the sensors he installed to determine if there is a cold Coca-Cola in the machine.
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