The Real Seven Wonders of the IT World

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:

• Computer Closest to the North Pole: NOAA's Camera #1
• Computer farthest from Earth: NASA's Voyager 1 satellite
• World's most intriguing data center: Google
• World's largest scientific grid computing project: The E-sciencE II (EGEE-II) project
• World's fastest supercomputer: IBM BlueGene/L (BGL)
• Smallest PC to run Windows Vista: OQO, Model 02
• Biggest Paradigm Change in Enterprise Software: Linux kernel

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 ...