Over at CIO Magazine they just published "The Seven Wonders of the IT World" which lists what are in the author's opinion, the seven most amazing things in IT. To summarize, the article lists:
Nice try perhaps but some of those aren't that spectacular unless you are outside the IT world. For example, the North Pole cam is interesting but really just Guinness Book stuff while the smallest PC to run Vista is, no matter how cool, a ridiculous inclusion as a "wonder". And Google's data center being "intriguing" is as nothing to how intriguing the NSA's data center most likely is (though I'll give you the point that we know more-or-less nothing about it).
There are a couple of items in that list that I can live with (Voyager 1 and Linux though the latter seems rather more abstract than you might think a wonder should be) but I think we can do better.
Readers: Over to you ...
The Leader in Network Knowledge
Linux kernel
This just got even MORE deserving, IMHO.
Canonical (Ubuntu) has teamed w/ VMWare to produce a 250MB no-frills Linux designed for virtual machines.
An "It Wonders" candidate
http://instaar.colorado.edu/tundracam/index.php
Needs Java, unfortunately.
How fast we've progressed is the real wonder
In a mere 20 years:
1 - from using 360K floppies to a 500 gb USB drive for less money! $40 - 4gb USB pen drives!
2 & 3 - A CPU that ran at 1.16 MHz & could only see 64K RAM (6502C, Atari & Commadore) to over 3 GHz/dual/quad CPUs & GBs of RAM.
4 - 150 baud dial up BBS to FIOS WWW.
5 - EGA/CGA screens to 32 million colors on 20 odd inches.
6 - fighting over who gets to run a program to stopping users from running too many on their own.
7 - catalogs to personalized purchasing portals. (Remember when Black Box only had a 1 page flyer?)
Some things are amazing in their monolithic refusal to change; users & suits.