Imagine you are a historian tracing the roots of IoT. You find a reference to a project from the 1980s where machines communicated their status to a computer. This is most likely an example of:

In the 1980s, machines communicating their status to a computer is a clear example of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication. This concept laid the foundation for the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) where devices and machines can communicate with each other autonomously.