Nearly 50 years ago, a few caffeine-dependent students in Carnegie Mellon’s computer science department built a light sensor and software to sense the availability of cold soft drinks in a Coke vending machine and connected it to the ARPANET, where they could see the status remotely, giving birth to the “internet of things.”
But few could have predicted how widespread the technology would become. From Fitbits and smart homes and a vacuum you can control from anywhere on the planet, the....