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We still don’t have the underground civilization that Isaac Asimov championed or the flying cars, but despite those disappointments science fiction has long been the conceptual home for technologies that later find themselves actually existing in the world.

Star Trek may be campy at times, but it too presaged several technologies we find in the world today. The most obvious is Star Trek’s pioneering vision when it comes to unified communications.

The Star Trek crew certainly didn’t call its communicators unified communications or VoIP, but they had a version of what we might recognize as elements of unified communications.

The first cellular phone was still a good decade or two away in the 1960s, but Kirk, Spock and McCoy could easily stay in touch via small devices called comms that clipped to their waistband and looked suspiciously like cell phones. These flip-phone style units were a glimpse of mobile telephony when it was far more dream than reality, although in functionality they often resembled walkie-talkies more than cell phones.

In the first episode of Star Trek, pieces of paper were spit out of a computer console. But later in the series, information was transmitted directly from Uhura's workstation to Spock's station seamlessly—just as people send faxes, voice and data with VoIP-enabled unified communications systems today.

When Kirk was not on the bridge, he was often in his quarters recording his Captain’s Log. From his quarters he still could also check in with Scotty and make command decisions when not physically on the bridge. This was an early version of the mobility trend seen today, where workers can perform their jobs from home as easily as the office.

Then there is the Bridge and its ability to communicate seamlessly with other ships via a giant television screen. This is perhaps the most obvious inspiration for unified communications.

Whether talking with Klingons or the Romulans from the bridge, Kirk would use an enormous video screen that was an early version of the type of video calling now available on every smartphone and tablet PC. It might be a stretch to compare the mother-in-law to a Klingon, but anyone can now establish a relatively easy video connection to friends, family and colleagues using unified communications solutions.

Now if we can just get those Star Trek teleporters to market, I think we’ll be set.

That and the flying cars, of course.