20 years ago a computer scientist in London needed a title for a slide deck – and came up with a name that stuck
Twenty years ago, Kevin Ashton sat in his cubicle at Procter & Gamble’s research and development offices in Egham, Surrey, just 17 miles from the London Science Museum now featuring cybersecurity and tech history in the exhibit Top Secret. On the screen of his IBM ThinkPad laptop was a PowerPoint presentation. It needed a name.
For six months the 30-year-old computer scientist had tried to persuade P&G to put radio frequency identification tags and other sensors on products in the supply chain. The tags and sensors would generate data about where the products were, whether they’d been scanned in a warehouse, or placed on a shelf, or sold.
The name of the presentation could influence whether the project moved forward. He needed it to pop.
“I knew I wanted to get the word ‘internet’ into it, because then I could get some buy-in," says Ashton (pictured above today). "All these old, white-guy CEO types were very excited about the internet, but at that time it was still just the dot .com revolution. It was all websites. For most people the internet was still dial-up. The Internet was something you got on via CDs from AOL.” (The online community America Online gave away compact discs that users could insert in their computers to upload software and join that network.)
“No one was talking about the Internet of anything.”
“People were using the phrase ‘smart packaging,’ but I was getting bored with that,” says Ashton, cofounder ..
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