A bit of history

IoT has existed in various forms for more than 35 years. The earliest example I found was a Coke machine at Carnegie Mellon University in 1982. Developed by four graduate students, Mike Kazar, David Nichols, John Zsarnay, and Ivor Durham, they hooked up the Coke machine to the internet so that they could check from their desks whether the machine was loaded with cold Coke. Source (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/).

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee invented the first webpage in 1991.

Another example is the internet toaster by John Romkey. He connected his toaster to the internet using the TCP/IP protocol. He created one control to turn on the toaster and one control to turn it off. Of course, someone had to put the bread in the toaster:

Source: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7786805/

Another interesting IoT example is the Trojan Room coffee pot. This was created by Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky in 1993. A camera was located in the Trojan Room in the computer laboratory of the University of Cambridge. It monitored the coffee pot levels, with an image being updated about three times a minute and sent to the building's server:

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot

As mentioned previously, we can see that even before we could imagine the possibilities, people had already worked on internet-related solutions.

Over the past 2 years, there was one thing that I kept on seeing and started believing strongly:

"Laziness is the mother of Invention."

Not necessity, not boredom, but laziness. In this day and age, nobody wants to do mundane things such as grocery shopping, walking up to a switch, and turning on a light or AC. So, we are searching for new and innovative ways to solve these problems.