The toaster that changed the world !

In 1990, the information and telecommunications industry was in its infancy. Only three million people, sharing 300,000 computers, had access to the internet. The first, brick-sized mobile phones stored a handful of numbers: they might have enabled an hour’s conversation, but offered neither colour, motion or information. Mark Zuckerberg was six years old; Sergey Brin was still in high school; Tim Berners-Lee had just laid out his vision for a worldwide web.

Then at a networking conference named Interop, in San Jose, California, engineers John Romkey and Simon Hackett demonstrated a slice of the future: a Sunbeam toaster hooked up to the new-fangled internet. For all its unsightly tangle of wire, it had just one control that switched the power on and off – a year later the engineers would add a miniature crane to manoeuvre the bread into place.

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