DZone

Introduction

You’ve probably heard about the Internet of Things in the context of smart cities or smart devices. But do you really know what it stands for? From IoT device management, through connectivity, to edge and cloud computing—there are a lot of buzzwords around this concept, none of which make it actually clearer. So what really is the Internet of Things? And why is it so exciting?

Necessity Is the Mother of Invention

The year was 1982 and some Carnegie Mellon students were fed up with having to go to the Coke machine at the campus only to find it out of their favorite soda. But what does this have to do with the IoT? Being computer science students, they devised a way to monitor the contents of said Coke machine over ARPANET, a wide-area network used by the US government and certain universities before the World Wide Web.

Source: DZone