Ask someone to picture the first Internet of Things device and they will probably imagine a smart speaker, a video doorbell, or a Wi-Fi lightbulb. The real answer is far more humble and far more fun. The first thing anyone connected to the internet and controlled remotely was a toaster. It happened in 1990, nearly a decade before the phrase "Internet of Things" existed, and the story says a surprising amount about how connected devices still work today.
A dare at Interop
In October 1989, at the Interop networking conference in San Jose, California, the event's founder Dan Lynch made networking engineer John Romkey a challenge: if Romkey could get a toaster onto the network, the appliance would get star placement on the show floor the following year. Romkey took the dare. Together with Australian engineer Simon Hackett, he wired up a Sunbeam Deluxe Automatic Radiant Control toaster so it could be switched on and off across the internet.
At Interop 1990, the toaster worked. It connected to the show's network over a SLIP link and was controlled using SNMP, the Simple Network Management Protocol normally used to manage routers and switches. A single value in an SNMP management information base turned the power on. Leave it on long enough and you got toast. The internet toaster was the hit of the show, and it is now widely regarded as the world's first IoT device.
There was one honest catch, and the crowd pointed it out immediately: a human still had to drop the bread in. So in 1991 Romkey and Hackett came back with a small robotic crane that picked up a slice and lowered it into the toaster, making the whole loop automatic. The demo was equal parts engineering and theatre, which is exactly why people still tell the story.
Why a toaster, and why SNMP
The choice of protocol is the part worth pausing on. Romkey did not invent a new toaster language. He reused SNMP, a standard that networking gear already spoke, and simply modeled the toaster as one more managed device with one controllable setting. That decision is the whole trick. Because the toaster spoke a common, well-understood protocol, any machine on the network already knew how to talk to it.
The term "Internet of Things" would not be coined until 1999, when Kevin Ashton used it in a presentation about putting RFID tags on supply-chain items. But the toaster had already demonstrated the core idea years earlier: take a physical object, give it a network address, expose a small piece of its state or behavior over a standard protocol, and suddenly the whole internet can read or change it.
What it still teaches connected-product teams
Thirty-five years later, the hardware has changed completely. A modern equivalent would be an ESP32 or a Raspberry Pi Pico costing a few dollars, talking MQTT or HTTP over Wi-Fi to a cloud backend. But the hard problems are the same ones the toaster faced. You need reliable connectivity. You need a sensible, interoperable protocol rather than a private one nobody else can use. And you need a clean bridge between the embedded device on one end and the software and cloud services on the other.
That last gap is where most connected-product ideas stall. Getting a sensor to blink on a bench is easy. Getting it to report data dependably, accept commands securely, and stay maintainable in the field is the real work, and it is the same silicon-to-cloud path whether you are building a toaster demo or a fleet of industrial monitors.
The Fluidwire angle
For students and startups here in the Philippines building their first connected prototype, the internet toaster is a genuinely useful mental model. Start with one clearly defined thing the device should report or do. Choose a protocol other systems already understand. Then wire the embedded side to the cloud so real users can actually reach it.
That is precisely the layer Fluidwire builds for connected-device teams, from firmware on the board to the web services on top. If you have a thing you want to put on the internet, whether it toasts bread or not, get in touch and we will help you close the gap from silicon to cloud.
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