The world’s first network-controlled toaster was demoed in 1991 at the Interop conference by Simon Hackett and John Romkey. It was a Sunbeam Deluxe Automatic Radiant Control Toaster which had been wired up to a computer, and with some extra software was able to be controlled by SNMP, a protocol for managing network devices. SNMP works over the internet, so this toaster could easily have been controlled by someone on the other side of the planet. However, getting the toast to them would have been a bit of a challenge.
The internet toaster was later updated to include a crane which loaded bread into the slots automatically, resulting in a fully-automatic internet toast experience.
Interesting fact: Simon Hackett later went on to create and manage Internode, one of the best internet service providers in Australia. This is obviously proof that being serious about toast leads to going places in the world. 
