That makes sense. I wish I knew what the IoT equivalent of a video game was, though. And while early-80s computers may not have actually done that many practica

That makes sense. I wish I knew what the IoT equivalent of a video game was, though. And while early-80s computers may not have actually done that many practical things, there were at least lots of speculative articles enthusing about the practical things they would be doing in the near future, and decades' worth of science fiction imagining impractical things they might be doing in the farther future. With the IoT, I don't know of any such writing. Presumably it exists, and I'm hoping somebody can point me to it, but I simply haven't encountered anything of the sort. Another commenter talked about the excitement of being able to manipulate real-world objects. Maybe when engineer types get excited about "IoT" it is really just because this is the first time they are imagining that firmware hacking could be within their reach? Firmware is old hat to me and mixing the internet into it sounds like a recipe for disaster, but maybe if people are used to thinking of themselves as web developers, and don't realize that it's already easy to manipulate hardware and this has nothing to do with the Internet, they would read "IoT" as "I can control it". For me, though, "IoT" implies that "it is no longer mine to control".