Blog

Close-up arrangement of interconnected IoT devices and sensors with LED indicators illuminated under professional technical lighting

In 1982, in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, a graduate student named David Nichols wanted a cold Coca-Cola and was tired of walking to the department's vending machine only to find it empty, or freshly refilled with warm bottles. According to an account published by IBM, he was joined by fellow graduate students Mike Kazar and Ivor Durham, and by John Zsarnay, a research engineer in the department. Carnegie Mellon's own history of the machine records that micro-switches were fitted to sense how many bottles sat in each of its six columns, and that the switches were wired to CMUA, the department's PDP-10 mainframe. Kazar wrote a program for a gateway, a small intermediary machine that translated between the switches and the network, which checked the state of each column several times a second. The group then modified the finger service on CMUA. Finger was a standard lookup tool on the ARPANET, the American research network from which the internet grew, normally used to check whether a given person was logged in, and the group arranged for a lookup of a user named [coke], who did not exist, to run the Coke status program instead. Typing [finger coke@cmua] on any machine on the department's Ethernet, its local wired network, and in principle on any machine on the ARPANET, therefore returned the state of the vending machine.Everything that a modern deployment contains was already present: a sensor at the edge, a small gateway to translate its signals, an existing network protocol repurposed to carry the reading, and a remote query that needed nobody to be standing at the device. It was also a convenience for four people, and Kazar said later that it never occurred to him in the 1980s that anyone would ask about it thirty years on. The machine is usually described as the first internet-connected appliance. It is better understood as a late arrival in a much older story, because the idea of a machine reporting its own condition to a distant system had been developed for decades in industry, and the Carnegie Mellon students were working with an academic network that happened to be available.The industrial lineage begins with supervisory control and data acquisition, or SCADA, the category of software used to gather data in real time from remote locations and to control equipment there. TechTarget's history of the Internet of Things describes the modern field as a natural extension of SCADA, and the claim holds up once the hardware is examined. In the late 1960s, Dick Morley, an engineer at the Massachusetts consultancy Bedford Associates, led the work on what is credited as the first programmable logic controller, or PLC. A PLC is a hardened industrial computer that repeatedly reads inputs such as switches and sensors and sets outputs such as motors and valves according to a stored program. This one was built for General Motors to replace the banks of electromechanical relays, switches wired together so that the state of one circuit controls another, that governed its assembly lines. The unit was designated the 084 because it was Bedford Associates' eighty-fourth project, and the company that grew from it was called Modicon. Its controllers were programmed in ladder logic, a notation deliberately drawn to resemble the relay schematics that electricians already read. In 1979 Modicon introduced Modbus, which is commonly described as the first industrial communications protocol, an agreed set of rules for how devices format and exchange messages, so that its controllers could talk to one another and to remote devices.The design of Modbus explains a good deal about what followed. It uses a master and slave arrangement, in which a single controlling device, the master, starts every exchange, and the other devices on the line, the slaves, only ever answer. The master asks a slave, by its address number, to report a value or to change one, and the slave replies; a slave never speaks unprompted. The values sit in two kinds of slot: coils, which are single on or off bits such as whether a motor is running, and registers, which are 16-bit numbers such as a temperature or a counter. The Modbus Organization has since adopted the terms client and server for the two roles, which describe the same relationship. The protocol first ran over serial links, which carry data one bit after another down a wire. RS-232 connects exactly two devices, while RS-485 is a multidrop standard, meaning that many devices share one pair of wires and each listens for its own address. The protocol carries no concept of identity or permission, because the wire it travelled on belonged entirely to the factory, so any device that could reach the line could read or change any value on it. Modbus/TCP, which carried the same messages over Ethernet using the Transmission Control Protocol, the reliable delivery layer of the internet, appeared in 1999. In 2004 the Modbus Organization took over the specification and declared it open, and in 2018 it published Modbus Security, which wraps the protocol in Transport Layer Security, or TLS, the layer that encrypts a connection and confirms who is on the other end, as it does for web browsing. The authentication that Modbus lacked from the start therefore arrived thirty-nine years after the protocol itself, and the gap between those two dates is the subject of most of the security discussion in the second half of this essay.A second lineage concerns identification. During the Second World War, British aircraft carried transponders, devices that automatically send a reply when a radar signal reaches them, so that friendly aircraft could be told from hostile ones. In 1948 the American engineer Harry Stockman published a paper titled [Communication by Means of Reflected Power], which set out how a device with no transmitter of its own could answer a radio signal by reflecting it back with its strength varied in a pattern that encodes information. That principle, backscatter, is how passive RFID tags, which carry no battery and run on energy taken from the reader's signal, still work. Their cost and reliability would take another fifty years to become tolerable, and the effort that finally got them there was a supply chain problem.The vocabulary of the field began to form at the start of the 1990s. Mark Weiser, a computer scientist at Xerox PARC, had developed the idea he called ubiquitous computing in the late 1980s, and in 1991 he set it out in Scientific American in an article titled [The Computer for the 21st Century]. His proposal was that computing would disappear into the environment as large numbers of cheap devices at three scales, which he called tabs, pads and boards, roughly an inch, a foot and a yard across. The proposal was a statement about interface and about number, and it did not mention radios or protocols, but it established the premise that the interesting computers of the future would be the ones nobody noticed.The working demonstrations of that decade were more modest and more entertaining. John Romkey, an American engineer who had written early TCP/IP software, connected a toaster to the network for the Interop conference in 1990, as the episode is usually recounted, and could switch it on and off using the Simple Network Management Protocol, a standard for monitoring and controlling network equipment remotely. In 1991 two researchers at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky, pointed a camera, connected to a frame grabber that digitised its video into still images, at the communal coffee pot in a room called the Trojan Room, so that colleagues on other floors could check whether there was coffee before making the trip. Stafford-Fraser wrote the client, the program that displayed the images on a colleague's screen using the X Window System, a networked display system common on Unix workstations, and Jardetzky wrote the server, the program that captured the pictures and supplied them on request. The images were small greyscale frames. In November 1993, once web browsers could display images, the laboratory's Martyn Johnson and Daniel Gordon put the camera onto the public internet, and the coffee pot became one of the early attractions of the web. It was switched off on 22 August 2001, and the pot itself was later sold on eBay. Like the Coke machine, it was a sensor whose value came from the fact that a person elsewhere could read it.The phrase that gave the field its name came from a different direction. Kevin Ashton, a British brand manager at Procter &amp; Gamble, had become interested in radio-frequency identification in the late 1990s, and RFID Journal's 2002 profile of him recounts that the interest began with a shade of Oil of Olay lipstick that was persistently out of stock in shops. In 1999 he prepared a presentation for Procter &amp; Gamble's senior management arguing for RFID in the supply chain, and he titled it [Internet of Things] to attach the proposal to the most fashionable technology of the year. He was not working alone or from nothing. Neil Gershenfeld, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who led a research programme called Things That Think, published the book [When Things Start to Think] in the same year, and the Auto-ID Center that Ashton helped to found at MIT in 1999 drew on the work of two engineering professors there, Sanjay Sarma and David Brock, who wanted to attach cheap RFID tags to objects and link them to data held in internet databases.That last point is the architectural idea that survived. The Auto-ID Center was funded by Procter &amp; Gamble and Gillette, with the Uniform Code Council, which administered the barcode standard in the United States, also contributing. Its purpose, according to the MIT Auto-ID Laboratory that succeeded it, was to develop the Electronic Product Code, an item identification system intended to replace the Universal Product Code, the standard black and white barcode. A barcode identifies a type of product, so every tin of the same beans carries the same number. An Electronic Product Code identifies the individual tin. Crucially, the tag was meant to hold little more than that number, while the information about the item lived on the network and was looked up when needed. The tag was therefore cheap and the intelligence was elsewhere, which is the same division of labour that a present-day temperature probe and its cloud platform follow. By the time the centre closed in October 2003, handing its work to Auto-ID Labs and a standards body called EPCglobal, ethw.org's profile of Ashton records that it had attracted 103 sponsors from around the world.The same year, 1999, produced the protocol that most connected devices now use to report. Andy Stanford-Clark of IBM and Arlen Nipper, who was then at Arcom Control Systems, wrote the first version of MQTT to monitor oil pipelines inside a SCADA system. Their devices were connected by satellite, which at the time was priced steeply by the byte, so the protocol had to be economical with both bandwidth and battery. It uses a publish and subscribe model in which devices send messages on named topics to a central broker, which routes them to whichever clients have subscribed, so a sensor in a remote field never needs to know how many systems want its readings. A minimal control message can be as small as two bytes. The original name stood for MQ Telemetry Transport, after the IBM message queuing product line, although the protocol has not stood for anything since IBM submitted version 3.1 to the OASIS standards body in 2013. Andy Stanford-Clark has said that the tipping point for adoption came around 2008, when the open source broker Mosquitto was released, and version 5 of the specification followed in March 2019. The default port, 1883, is unencrypted (a port is a numbered entry point on a networked machine that directs traffic to a particular service), and a TLS variant uses port 8883, which is a reminder that the protocol was designed for a pipeline and not for the open internet.The commercial test of the tag-and-database model came in 2003, when Walmart announced that its top one hundred suppliers would be expected to apply RFID tags to cases and pallets by January 2005. The mandate made the logistics industry take the technology seriously, and it also exposed the physics. Ultra-high-frequency passive tags work at frequencies that metal reflects and water absorbs, so their read range suffers on cans, bottles and metal packaging. The second-generation UHF specification that EPCglobal ratified in 2004, which was later incorporated into the ISO/IEC 18000-6 standard as Type C, improved read rates considerably, and RFID settled into the places where its limits mattered least, such as apparel, pallets and returnable assets. Tag cost remained the persistent constraint on item-level tagging of low-value goods.By the 2010s the components had become cheap enough to change who could build a connected device. The TechTarget history attributes the field's emergence to the convergence of wireless technologies, microelectromechanical systems (tiny mechanical sensors built into silicon chips), microservices (software assembled from small independent services) and the internet, and the practical consequences were visible on a hobbyist's desk. The Arduino board appeared in 2005 and the Raspberry Pi in 2012, and sensors that once required an industrial supplier arrived as parts costing a few rand. What remained unsolved was connectivity. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth have short range and draw more power than a sensor on a coin cell can afford, while second and third generation cellular modules were expensive and drained batteries quickly. The answer was a family of low-power wide-area networks. Sigfox used ultra-narrowband radio, which squeezes each transmission into a very thin slice of spectrum, and accepted very small messages, with an uplink payload of twelve bytes and a daily cap of 140 messages. LoRa, a technique for encoding data onto radio waves that favours long range at low power, was paired with an open networking layer called LoRaWAN. The mobile operators pursued two standards of their own, NB-IoT (narrowband IoT) and LTE-M (LTE for machines), both low-power variants of the 4G mobile standard that were completed in 2016 in Release 13 of the specifications maintained by 3GPP, the standards body for mobile networks. A Dataweek review of the South African market notes that the two cellular options offer similar range and power consumption, with LTE-M supporting higher speeds. By mid-2019, an Analysys Mason survey counted 112 announced NB-IoT networks and 103 using LoRaWAN, with Sigfox accounting for fewer deployments than either.The assumption that had held since Modbus, that these devices lived on private wires, failed in the autumn of 2016. On 20 September the website of the security journalist Brian Krebs was hit by a distributed denial-of-service attack, in which many hijacked machines flood a target with traffic until it cannot respond, at roughly 620 gigabits per second, nearly double the largest attack his mitigation provider had previously handled. At the end of that month the source code of the malware responsible, Mirai, was published online, and on 21 October a Mirai variant disrupted Dyn, a major provider of Domain Name System services, the lookup that translates website names into network addresses, which made sites such as Twitter, Netflix and Reddit unreachable for many users. Mirai is a botnet, a network of compromised devices under one operator's remote control, and it grew by scanning the internet for devices with Telnet, an old text-based remote login service, left open and trying a list of more than sixty factory default usernames and passwords. Researchers at the security firm Flashpoint told Krebs that many of the infected boards shared a default login of [root] and [xc3511], and that the credential was hardcoded in the firmware, the permanent software built into the device, so that an owner who wanted to change it could not. The Chinese component maker Xiongmai acknowledged that its recorders and cameras were involved, and Dyn reported tens of millions of distinct addresses associated with the botnet during the attack. The security technologist Bruce Schneier argued at the time that the economics of the Internet of Things meant the devices would stay insecure unless governments intervened, since neither the buyer nor the manufacturer bore the cost of a compromised camera.Set beside the earlier material, the episode has a clear lineage. Modbus assumed a private wire and carried no authentication. MQTT on its default port assumed a controlled environment. Consumer devices were shipped with fixed credentials on the assumption that they would sit behind a household router and be used by their owner. Each assumption was reasonable in the setting for which the technology was designed, and each stopped being reasonable when the device was connected to a routable network, which is what the word Internet in the field's name describes.In South Africa the question of connectivity has a local answer, and it is a commercial one. Vodacom and MTN each announced late in 2016 that they would deploy commercial NB-IoT networks in 2017. TechCentral reported that Vodacom, working with Huawei, upgraded an existing LTE site by software alone to carry NB-IoT on its licensed 900 megahertz spectrum, radio frequencies that the operator holds exclusive rights to use, and that the first demonstration was a water meter on the operator's own campus in Midrand. MTN, according to the same publication, began rolling out LoRaWAN alongside NB-IoT and LTE-M. A different route was taken by SqwidNet, which built a nationwide Sigfox network under Dark Fibre Africa's parent company, CIVH. Dataweek reported that the Sigfox network covered more than 85 per cent of the population within its first years, while a competing provider ran what it described as the largest open LoRaWAN network in Africa. TechCentral's interview with Sumeshin Naidoo, the chief commercial officer of Sigfox South Africa, records that SqwidNet later ran into difficulties and that its customers, among them Discovery Insure and Fidelity ADT, backed a rescue, after which the network continued as Sigfox South Africa with CIVH as a minority shareholder.For any South African organisation that deploys connected sensors, the history above has a practical reading. A device has to report through some network, and the choice of radio is also a choice of operator, with its own terms and its own prospects of survival. The Sigfox episode shows that a network can be technically sound and still change hands, and the Mirai episode shows that a device can be commercially successful and still be a liability. Every device in this account, from the vending machine in Pittsburgh to the water meter on a campus in Midrand, reported a state to a system that had to decide what that state meant.

The Evolution of the Internet of Things

The Evolution of Bluetooth: From Wireless Connections to a World Wire- FreeFrom connecting mobile phones to powering smart devices, Bluetooth has transformed how we communicate, work and experience technology.But how did it all begin? Imagine a world where connecting your phone to a speaker required a cable, transferring files between devices was a tedious process, and wireless accessories were far less common than they are today.Then came Bluetooth - a technology that helped make wireless connectivity part of everyday life.Today, Bluetooth connects headphones, speakers, keyboards, smartwatches, vehicles, medical devices and industrial equipment. What began as an effort to simplify communication between devices has evolved into an essential technology across personal, commercial and industrial environments.Let's explore how Bluetooth evolved and the innovations that shaped its journey.The Beginning: The Birth of Bluetooth The late 1990s | A new era of wireless communicationBluetooth technology emerged from efforts to develop a short-range wireless alternative to cables. In 1998, several technology companies established the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (Bluetooth SIG) to develop and standardise the technology so that devices from different manufacturers could communicate with one another.The vision was simple but powerful: allow electronic devices to exchange information without requiring a physical connection.The name itself has an interesting history. Bluetooth was named after Harald Bluetooth, a tenth-century Scandinavian king associated with uniting Denmark and Norway. The name symbolised the technology's mission to unite devices through a common communication standard.Bluetooth 1.0 and 1.1: Making Wireless Connections Possible 1999–2002 | The first steps towards a connected worldThe early Bluetooth specifications laid the foundations for wireless communication between compatible devices.Early applications focused on connecting mobile phones, computers and hands-free accessories. Although the technology was still developing, it introduced an important idea: devices from different manufacturers could communicate using a shared standard. The experience was not always seamless. Compatibility, setup and performance still had room for improvement. Nevertheless, Bluetooth had taken its first major step towards becoming a widely adopted connectivity solution. Bluetooth 2.0: Faster Data Transfer 2004 | Improving performanceBluetooth 2.0 introduced Enhanced Data Rate (EDR), improving the speed at which compatible devices could transfer data. This helped make Bluetooth more practical for everyday applications, including wireless accessories and data exchange. The focus was no longer simply on establishing a connection. It was also about improving the experience once devices were connected. Bluetooth 3.0: The Push for Higher Speeds 2009 | Expanding data-transfer capabilities Bluetooth 3.0 introduced an optional high-speed feature designed to support faster data transfers using an alternative radio technology when available. It represented another attempt to make wireless connections more capable and useful for data-intensive tasks. Although this approach did not become the foundation of all future Bluetooth applications, it contributed to the broader evolution of wireless connectivity. Bluetooth 4.0: The Rise of Bluetooth Low Energy 2010 | Small devices, bigger possibilities One of the most significant milestones came with Bluetooth 4.0, which introduced Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE). Unlike traditional Bluetooth implementations designed for applications such as continuous audio streaming, Bluetooth LE was designed to support applications that could operate with much lower power consumption. This opened the door to devices that needed to operate for extended periods on small batteries. Applications expanded into areas such as fitness trackers, environmental sensors, smart home devices and other connected products. The bigger picture: Bluetooth was no longer just about connecting two personal devices. It was becoming a foundation for the growing Internet of Things (IoT). Bluetooth 5: Greater Range and New Possibilities 2016 | Extending the reach of connectivity Bluetooth 5 brought significant improvements to Bluetooth Low Energy, including options for higher data rates and longer range. These capabilities helped support a broader range of applications, from connected home devices to location-based services and sensor networks. For businesses, these developments created more opportunities to connect devices, collect information and improve visibility across their operations. However, actual range and performance still depend on the device, configuration, environment and obstacles between devices. Bluetooth 5.2: A New Chapter for Audio 2020 | Advancing wireless audio Bluetooth 5.2 introduced features that laid important groundwork for LE Audio, a new approach to Bluetooth audio built on Bluetooth Low Energy. LE Audio supports innovations such as the LC3 audio codec and Auracast broadcast audio, which can enable audio to be shared with multiple compatible receivers. These developments have the potential to improve accessibility and create new listening experiences in public venues, entertainment environments and everyday life. Bluetooth 6.0 and Beyond: Smarter Connections 2024 onwards | Greater precision and continued innovation Bluetooth continues to evolve beyond basic device pairing and data exchange. Bluetooth Core Specification 6.0 introduced Channel Sounding, a technology designed to enable more secure and precise distance awareness between compatible devices. It also introduced improvements to Bluetooth communication processes. These capabilities can support applications such as finding devices and improving proximity-based experiences. The evolution has continued through subsequent specifications, including Bluetooth Core 6.2 and 6.3. Each generation builds on the shared standard, adding capabilities for developers and manufacturers to implement in compatible products. The future of Bluetooth is not simply about connecting devices. It is about making effective connections more efficient and intelligent.

The Evolution of Bluetooth

Almost nothing under a guitarists' fingers was designed by the guitar business Every piece by Francisco Tárrega that I have played on stage was written for strings made of sheep gut, and I have never once put a gut string on a guitar. Neither has anyone I have played alongside. The music outlasted the material it was composed for by about seventy years, which is a long time for nobody to think much about it. Tárrega was a Spanish composer and guitarist who died in 1909, and his pieces are where most classical players end up sooner or later. Until the late 1940s the trebles on a classical guitar were plain gut, and the basses were a gut or silk core wound with fine metal wire. Gut had been the standard for plucked instruments since long before the guitar took a shape anyone today would recognise, and it held through the vihuela, through the baroque guitar, and right up to the generation that heard him play. Everything he left behind was worked out on intestine. What that cost the player is worth being specific about, because it was not a small thing. Gut absorbs moisture, so an instrument that sat in tune through a dry afternoon rehearsal drifted once the hall filled with people and warmed up. Tuning between pieces was not a nervous habit, it was maintenance. New strings kept stretching for days after they went on. They broke without much warning, and the trebles broke most, which is precisely where the repertoire lives. The part that would have driven me out of my mind, though, is the inconsistency. Strings were made by hand from material that varied from one animal to the next, and the diameter varied along the length of a single string. A string that is not the same thickness at both ends will not play in tune with itself up the neck. You can be exact at the nut and wrong at the twelfth fret, and no amount of practice touches it, because it is not you. Every player of that era was working around an instrument that was quietly lying to them, and had no way to prove it. Andrés Segovia, the Spanish virtuoso who did more than anyone to establish the guitar as a concert instrument, spent years on this. He leaned on his luthier, the German maker Hermann Hauser, to press the manufacturers at Pirastro for consistent gauging, and by his own account got very little back for it. He later wrote about the brittleness of the strings he grew up with as a plain handicap on playing, which is an unusual admission from someone of that standing. The point is that the best player alive could not fix it by being better. It was a materials problem and it needed a materials answer. The first real answer had already arrived, three centuries earlier, for a different part of the instrument. A low note needs mass on the string. You can add mass by making the string thicker, but past a certain point a thick gut string turns stiff, stops responding to the right hand, and sounds dead however well you play it. Early makers tried twisting several lengths of gut together, which helped and was not enough. The proper solution was to wind fine metal wire around a flexible core, so that the winding carries the weight while the core keeps the flexibility. The string gets heavy without getting rigid. The oldest surviving record of it is a note from 1659 describing lute strings covered in silver wire, credited to a maker recorded only as Goretsky and preserved in correspondence involving the chemist Robert Boyle. Within a few decades the technique had spread out of Bologna through European instrument making, and it did rather more than deepen the bass register. It changed which instruments survived. Wound strings are part of why the cello displaced the older bass violin as quickly as it did, because a smaller body could suddenly produce a serious low end. A change in string construction rewrote the instrument around it, which is a pattern worth holding on to for later. That trick has never gone away, and this is where I stopped reading about the subject and started recognising it. I spent a few years playing metal, mostly in drop tunings, and the reason a slackened low string still speaks instead of flapping about under the pick is exactly the 1659 solution. The low string on a down-tuned electric and the sixth string on a classical guitar are the same idea wearing different clothes. Whoever Goretsky was, he is still doing work in my case every time I open it. Notice, though, where that came from. Not from instrument makers, and not from players. It came from the wire-drawing trade, which had got good enough at pulling metal fine and even to make wrapping practical. That is the first instance of something that runs through the entire history. The trebles took another three hundred years and a war. Gut has a second market, and during the Second World War that market won: surgical suture demand took priority, and good gut strings became almost impossible to buy in the United States. Segovia, living in New York by then and complaining about it to anyone within earshot, raised the shortage at a party with a British diplomat. A month later the man produced nylon strings obtained through contacts at DuPont. Segovia found them clear with a faint metallic edge he wanted removed. Promising, not right. Albert Augustine, a luthier working in New York, had reached the same material from the other direction. Unable to source what he needed under wartime restriction, he came across nylon sold as fishing line in an army surplus shop in Greenwich Village. He and Segovia were introduced in 1946 by Vladimir Bobri, the illustrator who edited the magazine Guitar Review, and between them they decided the idea was worth pursuing properly. DuPont were not persuaded. They did not believe guitarists would accept the sound of a synthetic string, and agreed to supply the material only on the condition that Augustine did the development work himself. He spent three years grinding and polishing monofilament in his basement, refining the trebles through a long back and forth with Segovia about tone. At some point DuPont ran a blind listening test with their own staff, and their own staff picked the nylon over gut. The first commercial sets were produced in 1948 at the E. &amp; O. Mari string works in New York, with the company's president Olinto Mari. The basses were harder and took longer; Augustine wound a nylon multifilament core with gold, with aluminium, and with several other metals before he and Segovia agreed that silver was the one that sounded right. What actually changed there was not tone, whatever the marketing said afterwards. A nylon monofilament is extruded, and extruded means identical. The four-hundred-year problem Segovia had been raising since the 1920s was not solved by a better craftsman or a stricter workshop. It was solved by taking the craft out of the process altogether. The string stopped being made and started being produced, and every guitarist since has inherited an instrument that tells the truth about its own intonation. By the early 1960s the electric guitar had arrived at its own version of the problem, and this is the episode I find hardest to let go of, because here the guitar industry is not a bystander but an obstacle. Electric guitars left the factory with heavy sets, commonly a .012 or .013 on top and a wound third string. Ernie Ball, who ran a teaching studio and what was probably the first guitar-only shop in the United States, watched his students blister their fingers trying to hold that third string down, let alone bend it. He also noticed what working players had already worked out for themselves: throw away the low E, move every string up a position, and put a banjo string on top to get a light plain first. The technique existed before the product did. People wanted to bend notes and were assembling their own sets out of spare parts in order to do it. Ball went to Fender and asked for a lighter gauge set. Leo Fender, who founded the company and designed most of what it sold, turned him down, and his reasoning is the part that matters. Lighter strings meant less tension, less tension meant the guitars would need re-engineering, and he was not interested in redesigning his instruments around somebody else's strings. Ball went to Gibson and got the same answer. So he had the sets made himself and put them out under his own name in 1962. Within about a decade Slinkys were the default for rock guitarists, and the companies that had refused him were selling light gauge sets of their own.Everything downstream of that, the whole modern vocabulary of electric lead playing, the bends and the vibrato and the phrasing that depends on both, sits on a product two major manufacturers declined to make. Leo Fender was not being stupid, incidentally. He was right that it would mean changing the guitars, and the guitars did change. Not every improvement came in from outside, and the exception is instructive. In 1966 John Entwistle, the bass player in The Who, went to the factory of the string maker Rotosound in Kent because their roundwound sets were close and not quite right. The D and the G behaved. The E and the A would not vibrate properly. He sat there through an afternoon while James How, who had founded the company, built him strings with different cores and different gauges, and the fault turned out to be in the core rather than the winding: it was too thin, so the string was moving in a wide circle instead of a tight one. That one came from a string company and a player working on it together, which is how you might assume the whole history went. It is close to the only time it did. I like the detail more than anything else here, because the visible part of the string was fine. The problem was in the part nobody looks at. Meanwhile the classical side went back to the tackle box. The material that has done most to change classical guitar tone since nylon is PVDF, which everybody calls carbon, and which the French maker Savarez introduced as the Alliance range in 1990. It projects harder than nylon and lasts longer, and it now sits on a great many professional instruments. The Kureha chemical company in Japan developed it in the 1970s as fishing line, sold as Seaguar leader, and there are still classical players who buy the leader on a spool and cut their own trebles from it rather than pay string prices. So that is twice. The two great changes to the classical guitar's treble string, forty-two years apart, both came out of fishing tackle. The steel side got its own version seven years later. W. L. Gore, the company behind Gore-Tex, was developing coated industrial push-pull cable in 1997 and using guitar strings as convenient test pieces. The coated strings made decent cable and poor guitar strings, but somebody noticed they were staying clean while the uncoated ones went dull. That became Elixir, and coating in one form or another is now everywhere. Which leaves the string in an odd position. There is no unsolved acoustic problem left in it. Every constraint that shaped the music I learned has been answered, and almost every answer came from an industry that was not thinking about music at the time. The remaining questions are duller and closer to home: how long the tone survives contact with a human being, and what a set costs by the time it reaches you. That second one is not abstract here. Everything on the wall of a South African music shop came in through a port, priced against the rand, which is why almost every player I know runs a set well past the point where it has anything left to give. The climate does not help either. Strings die faster in Durban than they do in Pretoria, and that is corrosion rather than folklore. Four hundred years of gut and wire and polymer, arriving by way of a wire mill, a war, an industrial cable programme and two tackle boxes. And what I end up playing on next month comes down to what the shop happened to order.

The Evolution of Guitar Strings

Freshly roasted coffee beans cascading from cooling tray in artisanal roastery with natural golden light

From ancient discovery to a global culture Few beverages have travelled as far - geographically and culturally - as coffee. What began centuries ago as a humble discovery has evolved into a global industry, a daily ritual, a social experience and, increasingly, a highly personalised product. From traditional coffee ceremonies to automated machines and app-based orders, the story of coffee is also a story of innovation, changing consumer behaviour and technology. Where It All Began Coffee's origins are commonly traced back to Ethiopia, where legend tells of a goat herder named Kaldi who noticed his goats becoming unusually energetic after eating the berries of a certain plant. Whether or not the legend is historically accurate, coffee eventually made its way from Ethiopia to Yemen, where it began to be cultivated and prepared as a beverage. By the 15th century, coffee was being traded and consumed in Yemen, and coffee houses began emerging across the Middle East. These establishments became more than places to enjoy a drink - they became spaces for conversation, business, learning and social interaction. And so, coffee's evolution had already begun. Coffee Goes Global As trade routes expanded, coffee travelled beyond the Middle East into Europe and eventually across the world. By the 17th century, coffee houses were appearing throughout Europe. They became meeting places for merchants, intellectuals, artists and entrepreneurs. Coffee was no longer simply a beverage. It was becoming part of culture and commerce. As demand increased, coffee cultivation spread to regions across Asia, the Caribbean, Central America and South America. Today, coffee is grown in numerous countries, with different regions producing beans with distinct flavours, aromas and characteristics. From Bean to Brand As the coffee industry matured, so did the way coffee was produced, packaged and sold. Coffee moved from local markets and traditional preparation methods into an increasingly industrialised supply chain. Roasting became more sophisticated. Packaging evolved. Grinding became more accessible. Instant coffee introduced convenience to millions of consumers. The emergence of cafés and international coffee chains then transformed coffee consumption once again. Coffee became an experience. Consumers could choose between different beans, roasts, brewing methods, flavours and serving styles - creating a much more personalised relationship with the product. The Rise of Specialty Coffee The modern coffee consumer is increasingly interested in where their coffee comes from, how it was produced and how it reaches their cup. This has contributed to the growth of specialty coffee culture. Single-origin beans, artisan roasting, pour-over methods, cold brew and carefully controlled extraction have introduced a new level of appreciation for coffee. The conversation has shifted from: “Do you want coffee?” to: “What kind of coffee do you want?” Origin, roast profile, processing method, brewing technique and flavour notes can all influence the final experience. Technology Meets Coffee Like many industries, coffee has also been transformed by technology. Modern coffee machines can control temperature, pressure and extraction time with remarkable precision. Automated equipment allows businesses to improve consistency and efficiency, while digital platforms make ordering and payment faster and more convenient. Behind the scenes, technology is also playing a role across coffee supply chain. From inventory management and warehouse operations to traceability, forecasting and distribution, the journey from coffee farm → processing → roasting → warehouse → retailer → consumer involves a complex network of people, processes and technology. This is where the evolution of coffee becomes particularly interesting. The cup may look simple. The journey behind it is anything but. The Coffee Consumer Has Evolved Perhaps the biggest transformation has been the consumer. Today's coffee drinker has more choices than ever before. There is specialty coffee, instant coffee, ready-to-drink coffee, cold brew, flavoured coffee, plant-based alternatives and countless brewing methods. Consumers increasingly expect quality, convenience, transparency and personalisation. And businesses have had to evolve with that. Understanding demand, managing stock accurately, maintaining product information and delivering the right product at the right time have become increasingly important in a competitive coffee market. What's Next for Coffee? The evolution of coffee is far from over. As consumer expectations continue to change and technology advances, we can expect further innovation across the industry - from smarter brewing equipment and automated cafés to improved traceability, sustainable production and more data-driven supply chains. The future of coffee may look very different from its past. But one thing remains consistent: Coffee continues to bring people together. From an Ethiopian coffee ceremony to a modern office meeting, from a neighbourhood café to a warehouse supplying thousands of stores, coffee has become much more than a drink. It is a product shaped by history, culture, innovation, commerce and people. From bean to beverage. From tradition to technology. From a simple cup to a global industry. ☕ The story continues.

The Evolution Of Coffee

1. Ancient Origins - Tobacco &amp; Indigenous Use Nicotine occurs naturally in tobacco plants. Indigenous peoples in the Americas used tobacco in various cultural, ceremonial and medicinal contexts long before industrial tobacco products existed. ⬇️ 2. 15th–16th Century - Tobacco Reaches Europe Following European contact with the Americas, tobacco was introduced to Europe and gradually spread to other parts of the world. ⬇️ 3. 18th–19th Century - Tobacco Becomes Commercial Tobacco moved from primarily traditional use into an increasingly commercial industry. Products such as snuff, cigars, pipes and chewing tobacco became widespread. ⬇️ 4. Late 19th–Early 20th Century - The Cigarette Revolution Industrial manufacturing transformed cigarettes. Mechanisation made cigarettes faster and cheaper to produce, helping create mass-market tobacco consumption. ⬇️ 5. 20th Century - Mass Production &amp; Mass Marketing Cigarettes became deeply embedded in popular culture. Advertising, sponsorships and product branding helped establish tobacco as a major global consumer industry. ⬇️ 6. 1950s–1990s -Science Changes the Conversation Research increasingly established the relationship between cigarette smoking and serious health consequences. Governments began introducing health warnings, advertising restrictions and smoking regulations. ⬇️ 7. 21st Century - The Rise of Alternative Nicotine Products Nicotine consumption began moving beyond traditional cigarettes, with products including e-cigarettes/vapes, nicotine pouches and heated tobacco products emerging in different markets. ⬇️ 8. Today - From Tobacco to Nicotine Technology The industry has evolved from burning tobacco to developing products designed to deliver nicotine in different ways. At the same time, regulation, public-health policy and debates around addiction and harm continue to shape the market. &nbsp;

The Evolution of Tobacco

Professional hands holding tablet displaying unified inventory dashboard with organized product categories and supplier tracking columns

The barcode's hard part was never the scanner Product master data has always advanced by agreement rather than by invention. RFID is the current proof. At a minute past eight on the morning of 26 June 1974, a cashier at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio passed a ten-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit over a laser scanner. It rang up at US$0.67. That was the first Universal Product Code ever scanned in a shop, and the equipment behaved exactly as intended. The technology is the short part of the story. The committee that made the moment possible had been convened at the turn of the 1970s, and very little of what it did was engineering. It brought in consultants to define a numeric format. It argued over how many digits the code should carry, who was entitled to issue one, what a manufacturer prefix signified, and what should happen when someone wanted to change a number already in circulation. Several competing symbol designs were submitted by technology firms; IBM's linear version was approved on 3 April 1973, and a council was established the following year for the sole purpose of administering it. Then adoption stalled. A shop gained nothing from installing scanners unless manufacturers had already printed codes on most of what it sold, and the working threshold was somewhere near 70 per cent of the products on the shelf. Three years after that first scan, fewer than 200 American grocery stores had scanning equipment installed. The invention was finished. The agreement was not.What was actually being built The UPC usually gets filed under automation, which undersells it considerably. What that committee produced was a governance instrument: a rule about who owns a number, who may change it, and what the number is permitted to refer to, backed by an organisation whose entire job is enforcing that rule. The printed symbol is the visible consequence, not the achievement. The arrangement still runs. GS1 administers it internationally, and GS1 South Africa issues the 600 prefixes that appear on goods produced here. A number means one thing rather than two because an institution exists to prevent the second meaning from taking hold. That is product master data management. It predates the term by about thirty years. The sequel that never quite materialises. Which brings us to RFID, a technology that has been eighteen months away from mainstream adoption for roughly two decades. Walmart announced the first serious mandate in 2003, instructing its top 100 suppliers to tag cases and pallets within two years. It was extended to all suppliers in 2005 and quietly put on hold by 2007. The usual explanation at the time was cost: tags ran to about US$0.25 each, which is impossible arithmetic on a tin of beans. The mandate returned in 2020 for apparel, expanded into home, toys, electronics and sporting goods in 2022, and took in more than a dozen further categories by February 2024. The cost explanation has since expired. Passive UHF inlays now sit between US$0.03 and US$0.05 in volume, which is roughly R0.50 to R0.80 or three to four euro cents a tag, and retailers running item-level programmes in apparel report stock accuracy in the high nineties against a baseline that rarely clears seventy. Those are dollar prices at the factory gate, so a South African buyer should add freight, duty and whatever the rand is doing that month before treating the conversion as a landed cost. Even after all of it, the business case works, and it has worked for several years. Yet outside apparel and general merchandise, RFID remains a pilot technology. Grocery and fast-moving consumer goods, where the inventory accuracy problem is arguably worst, are largely untouched. If the technology is mature and the economics are sound, something else is holding it. The something else is the same thing the grocery committee spent four years on. The supplier buys the tag; the retailer banks the benefit. The UPC had precisely that split, and resolving it took an industry body, a shared numbering standard and the better part of a decade in which competitors agreed to be bound by the same rule. RFID never got that. It got leverage instead, in the form of one very large buyer telling its suppliers what to do. Leverage and agreement produce different results. A mandate buys compliance up to its own boundary and nothing past it. A supplier tagging for one retailer's requirement applies the tags at the end of the line, encodes them to that retailer's specification, and changes nothing upstream. The tag becomes a shipping condition rather than a piece of master data. Ask that supplier what its item identifiers look like internally and you will usually find the same spreadsheets that were there before. And the leverage itself is weakening. Amazon has just ended Walmart's thirteen-year run as the world's largest company by revenue, largely on the strength of cloud, advertising and marketplace services rather than retail. That qualification is the interesting part rather than a defence of Walmart: retail demand is now distributed across marketplaces, discounters and direct channels, and no single buyer sits where the American grocery industry collectively sat in 1973. Whatever replaces the barcode will have to be agreed rather than imposed, and there is currently no forum doing the agreeing. The same problem, renamed each decade The internal version has a similar lineage. Manufacturing planning systems in the 1970s introduced the item master file, on the reasonable theory that a business calculating requirements first needs one authoritative description of each part. ERP promised to extend that across the whole organisation: one system, one database, one version of every product. It mostly did not work out that way, and not because the software was poor. Companies acquired other companies, divisions ran their own instances, and specialist systems were bought wherever a module was weak. By the middle of the 2000s the resulting mess had a name and a software category built around it. Since then, we have added integration platforms, data lakes, APIs that make any system reachable from any other, and now AI models pointed at the accumulated result. Each generation has solved a transport problem. None has touched the agreement problem. The cost of moving data between systems has collapsed to near zero, while the difficulty of getting two departments to accept a shared definition of "case" has not moved at all since 1973. Where it lands in a warehouse A warehouse management system sits downstream of nearly everyone else's product data. Records arrive from ERP, from procurement, from suppliers, from carriers. The warehouse is where all of it converges and, unhelpfully for whoever runs it, where the consequences become physical. Unit of measure is the classic. A case is six in one system and twelve in another, both entered correctly by people following their own local convention, and the gap only surfaces as a stock variance three weeks later. Dimensions and weights are the quiet one: cubing, cartonisation, slotting logic and transport rating all depend on them, they are frequently captured once during implementation and never verified again, and no department considers itself the owner. Duplicate item codes appear when the same physical product is bought from two suppliers under two references. Partial RFID adoption adds a category of its own. A tagged item carries a serialised identifier that has to reconcile with the GTIN on the barcode and with the internal item code, which means a half-adopted programme introduces a third identifier layer before it removes any work. Sites that treat RFID as a labelling project rather than a master data project tend to discover this after the readers are installed. None of this presents as a data problem. It presents as a picker standing in an aisle holding something the system says should not be there, and the system takes the blame for a decision made in a spreadsheet upstream two years earlier. The local complication South African operations carry a version of this that global vendor material tends not to describe. Trading partners here sit at very different levels of data maturity. A distributor may receive impeccably coded stock from a multinational supplier in the morning and take delivery in the afternoon from a smaller local producer whose barcodes are inconsistent, absent, or reused across variants. Relabelling at receiving becomes routine, and every relabel is a point at which somebody on shift makes a mapping decision that nobody records. RFID does not transfer cleanly either. Local deployments operate in the ETSI band at 865 to 868 MHz, while the American mandates are written around 902 to 928 MHz, so hardware and specifications do not simply arrive ready-made with the standard. The retailers who have moved here have done so on their own terms rather than in response to anyone's mandate. TFG began rolling out item-level RFID across its fashion brands in 2019, and Woolworths deployed across more than two hundred fashion, beauty and home stores. Both are single-organisation programmes covering their own supply chains, which is exactly the pattern: agreement inside one business is achievable, agreement across an industry is not currently on offer. Consolidation adds to it. A group that has acquired regional operators inherits their numbering conventions along with their warehouses, and each of those conventions was perfectly rational in isolation. Merging them is presented as a systems integration project when it is really an argument about definitions that needs someone senior enough to settle it. Questions that tend to produce a pause•Who in your organisation is permitted to create a new item code, and who reviews it? •When two departments disagree about what a field means, is there a person whose decision ends the argument, or does it get resolved by whoever is more persistent? •When last were product dimensions physically verified rather than inherited from an import file? •When a supplier changes a pack configuration, how does the warehouse find out, and how long is the gap before the record catches up? •If a customer mandated serialised tagging next year, would you be able to tell them what your item identifiers actually are? If those questions produce hesitation rather than answers, the problem is already there. It has simply not been expensive yet. Fifty years onThe grocery committee spent roughly four years arguing about a twelve-digit number, and it was the right allocation of effort. The scanner was ready in months. The agreement was the product. That distinction has not been learned since. RFID has better physics, cheaper hardware and a working business case, and it has spent twenty years short of the adoption its supporters keep predicting, because a mandate is not an agreement and the industry has not yet built anything that is. The tooling available today is far better than anything available in 1973 and it will resolve nothing on its own. Someone has to own the definition. Someone has to be allowed to say no.

Blog

The Evolution of the Internet of Things

The Evolution of Bluetooth

The Evolution of Guitar Strings

The Evolution Of Coffee

The Evolution of Tobacco

The Evolution of Product Master Data Management