Bad News is Good News.

โ€œI started talking about the Machine Internet nearly 20 years ago, before it was even called โ€œthe Internet of Things.โ€ Sensors and motes, tied to an analysis by wireless networks. Anything whose performance can be adjusted can now be monitored and controlled by a central intelligence. You can monitor the condition of parts and schedule maintenance before things break. This matters if the part is your heart, and its breaking could kill you.โ€

๐Ÿ’ฌ Dana Blankenhorn

I’ll take that claim and raise you by a few years …

A group of us started talking about the topic in the mid 90s.

We had the obligatory startup โ€ฆ Flypaper โ€ฆ with a back end we called โ€˜The Megaserverโ€™ - and without getting into the details - the system allowed us to render a website - โ€˜just in timeโ€™ - by assembling components out of a database. Our message at the time โ€ฆ the website only exists when somebody is visiting it.

It lead to some interesting developments and conversations.

I can still remember one scenario where we envisaged every car having its own website, assembled from thousands of components that each mapped to specific things and functions in the car โ€ฆ this is mid-90sโ€ฆ people didnโ€™t get it.

And then came the DOT BOMB. And oblivion swooped in.

Still very proud of what โ€˜weโ€™ built.

Definitely ahead of its time … I mean think about the tools we had in the mid-90s to build this thing!