Ditto for credit cards of any stripe. Fax machines, too. But also such things as the ubiquitous color printing in our lives. Biotech pharmaceuticals require networked intelligence to manage living soups as they flow by the barrelful from one vat to the next. Even processed snack foods are here to tempt us because the dispersed machines needed to cook them can be coordinated by a network.
Ordinary manufacturing becomes better when managed by netted intelligence.
Networked equipment creates not only purer steel and glass, but its adaptive nature allows more varieties to be made with the same equipment. Small differences in composition can be maintained during manufacturing, in effect creating new kinds of precise materials where once there was only one fuzzy, imprecise material. Networking will also inform the maintenance of products. By plugging a phone line into a machine, operators at the factory can peek inside its guts to see if it is working properly and often fix it if not. The technique of remote diagnostics was developed by satellite makers who had no choice but to do repairs at a distance.