Soon, two other students - Mike Kazar and Ivor Durham - and a research engineer at the university, John Zsarnay, began working alongside him to make it happen. Nichols wrote a few friends about his idea to track the machine’s contents remotely and put an end to unsatisfying soda runs once and for all.
“Suddenly, I remembered tales of the Prancing Pony at Stanford and realized that we didn’t have to put up with this, that we had the technology,” Nichols later recalled. But his office was “a relatively long way” from the building’s Coke machine, and considering his fellow students’ substantial caffeine habits, Nichols knew there was a good chance it would be empty - or that, if the machine had recently been refilled, the sodas inside would be tragically warm. One day in the early 1980s, David Nichols, a graduate student in Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science department, was in his office on campus at Wean Hall craving a soda.
Necessity, as always, was the mother of invention. Though it was primitive by today’s standards, it holds a unique distinction: It was, as far as anyone knows, the world’s first IoT device. Before there were Internet-connected umbrellas and juicers, water bottles and factories - before there was even a modern Internet - there was a humble Coke machine in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that could report its contents through a network.