E-mail from my crockpot

Computer Life column for March 28, 1998
by
Richard Gordon

"The Internet is no longer just for computers," concludes Steve Steinberg in the April 1998 Wired, in an article about a company called iReady that licenses "cheap chips" to help all sorts of devices understand Internet information.

Steinberg quotes Ryo Koyama, iReady's CEO, as saying that the company is currently focusing on consumer electronics. Instead of buying a WebTV-like box that sits on top of your TV, you'd buy a TV with a special computer chip that would turn your TV into your Internet portal.

This chip design has potential to take what has been a nerd hobby and make it a mainstream possibility.

Coffee makers and Coke machines

Back around 1984, some computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University put their departmental soda machine on the Internet. They were tired of walking up the hall and finding the machine empty or, worse, dispensing warm Coca Cola products. They created a weird assortment of computer programs, home made circuitry and networked computers that let them query the status of the machine from their offices-and then from anywhere on the Internet.

In 1990, Dave Nichols, one of the project's originators, described the basic theory: "When 24 Cokes were sold, the column empty light went on, and there were still two bottles left in the feeding mechanism. The column empty light also came on for about two or three seconds whenever a Coke was sold, a happy coincidence. The wires for the lights from the door came to a connector before going to the [control panel]. We could get parts for this connector, so we were able to make all the changes without damage to the machine" (www-cse.ucsd.edu/users/bsy/coke.history.txt).

They monitored the current being sent to the lights and wrote programs that deduced how many bottles from each column had been sold, the time of the machine's last "feeding," number of cold bottles in each column, which columns were "empty," and so on.

Another famous first was a camera pointed at a coffeepot in the computer science department at Cambridge University-then hooked up to the fledgling World Wide Web. Soon, other soda machines and coffee makers started coming on line.

Yahoo! now has an entire category devoted to "Interesting Devices Connect to the Net" (www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/Entertainment/Interesting_Devices_Connected_to_the_Net/). You can even check the status of the laundry machines in one of the dorms at MIT (spleen.mit.edu/cgi-bin/cgilaundry).

It's not all frivolity, however: Things such as seismic monitors and research telescopes are also on line.

Imagine

If indeed iReady's chip designs begin to show up in household appliances, these nerdy experiments may become part of our 21st Century life.

• As you leave your office, you could send e-mail to your microwave, telling it to start cooking.

• Your crockpot could notify your breadmaker when to start that whole wheat loaf.

• You could query your refrigerator to determine if you need to buy more milk on the way home.

• Your son's skateboard could contain a "come home NOW" light activated by a command from your computer or telephone. Before you say that's farfetched, think about some of the fancy pagers on the market.

• If you forgot to set the VCR to record that day's Brazil vs. Germany soccer match before you left home, you could double-check the TV listings at The News Journal's Web area (scene.delawareonline.com), then program the VCR over the Net.

It's starting now

While you're packing your bag at the office, you can already check the traffic for your ride home-if you travel on I95-live via WebCam (www.usastar.com/i95/webcams.htm). Two of the WebCams listed show I95 in Delaware: near Rt. 273 and just south of the Concord Pike.

Will we have traffic alert system in our cars some day? Imagine being able to see congestion 4 miles up the road so you can hop off I95 and cut over to Harmony Road.

Copyright © 1998, The News Journal Company

Computer Life Index