In a 1993 Wired feature, “Seven Wired Wonders,” science writer James Gleick was right on target in identifying the telephone as the tool of the near-future. An excerpt:

“After a century of fading into our bedside tables and kitchen walls, the telephone — both the instrument and its network — is on the march again. As a device shrinking to pocket size, the telephone is subsuming the rest of our technological baggage — the fax machine, the pager, the clock, the compass, the stock ticker, and the television. A sign of the telephone’s power: It is pressing the computer into service as its accessory, not the other way round.

We know now that the telephone is not just a device. It is a network — it is the network, copper or fiber or wireless — sprouting terminals that may just as well be workstations as headsets or Princesses. As the network spreads, it is fostering both the universality and the individuality of human discourse. The Net itself, the world’s fastest-spreading communications medium, is the telephone network in its most liberating, unruly, and fertile new guise.

Thus Bell’s child is freeing our understanding of the possibilities that lie in ancient words: neighborhood and meeting and information and news. It is global; it is democratic; it is the central agent of change in our sense of community. It is how, and why, we are wired.”