Top 10 IT thrillers

Unless you've been living the life of a hermit for the past few weeks you'll have heard that the diamanté-gloved pop star Michael Jackson has gone to the great gig in the sky.

We try and make these top 10 lists timely so, in honour of his possibly best known track, we decided to look at the most thrilling technologies out there. In fact, Jackson inspired us to another top 10 idea which we'll do next week when he's not so warm in his coffin, since it's a tad less respectful.

A great many products and technologies are bad, really really bad. So bad, in fact, that you want to tell the vendor to beat it. Some, however, are real thrillers. Perhaps they seem a bit off the wall at first, but once they hit the market everyone loves them, whether black or white [OK, we get the point: Ed.].

To some the idea that technology can be thrilling at all may seem a little odd, but what can we say, we're geeks and make no apology for the fact.

This week, we honour the departed king of pop by counting down the best technology thrillers, essential tools and cool innovations fit for a king.

Honourable mention: Windows 7
Iain Thomson: OK, we had a bit of a row about this one. Shaun expressed the opinion (in rather salty terms) that nothing Microsoft had made should ever make it onto a list of thrilling technologies. However, I held out for the inclusion of Windows 7 because I am a little bit thrilled that it's coming out.

This isn't down to the basic technology itself, although there are some really nice features in the new operating system. What's thrilling about Windows 7 is that it isn't Vista. At last new computer buyers are going to get a halfway decent operating system rather than the three legged dog that is Vista.

So yes, Windows 7 does give me a little thrill. Sure, its coders haven't hit the Ballmer Peak as far as we can tell, but it'll be a relief to consign Vista to the dustbin of history.

Shaun Nichols: As Iain said, the most thrilling thing about Windows 7 is that it isn't Vista. Sure, Vista may have got a bad reputation that wasn't entirely deserved, but the fact is that Microsoft failed miserably with its last OS release and as a result many users are still running an OS that is closing in on its 10th birthday.

As reliable and broken-in as Windows XP has become, the old platform is really starting to show its age. If Microsoft can execute the release and deployment of Windows 7 properly. the it might just thrill a few users too.

Honourable mention: Fuel cell technology
Shaun Nichols: Perhaps this earns me a spot among the biggest nerds ever to walk the planet, but the recent advances in fuel cells have been pretty cool. Not only are they being used to power cars, but there have also been companies, such as IBM, that have looked into powering notebooks with fuel cells to achieve super-long battery life.

Yes, widespread adoption, if it ever happens, is still way off in the distance, and there are plenty of hurdles to overcome, but the potential for this technology is huge, and the impact it could potentially have is enormous.

Iain Thomson: It does seem like a bit of a dream - a laptop power supply that runs on fuel cells - but that dream is becoming reality.

Fuel cell technology does offer some major benefits, once it is fully matured. At the moment things are in the very early stages and fuel cells are bulky and relatively inefficient compared to their eventual promise. But it's a bit like comparing a Model T Ford to a Bugatti Veyron.

But thrilling? I'm not so sure. Certainly I'm thrilled at the promise, but the current implementation leaves me a little cold.

10. Robotics
Shaun Nichols: When we put this list together I was adamant that robots be on there. My only regret was that I couldn't sell Iain on placing it higher on the list.

Let's face it: robots are awesome. Without them, science fiction novels would stink, cars would cost a fortune and Tokyo would be just another crowded city.

On a more serious note, robotics are becoming more pervasive and useful every day. Aside from practical uses such as industrial production, robots are saving lives around the world in functions such as disarming bombs or performing unmanned surveillance.

There's also the potential to improve the quality of life for those with disabilities such as paralysis. Robotic suits and chairs that allow unprecedented mobility are already being developed and sold.

Iain Thomson: So maybe I was a little harsh, but the scientist in me is slightly sceptical about the promise of a robotic future.

After all, we insist on trying to make robots look like humans, whereas most robotic engineers will tell you that the human form is relatively inefficient for a variety of purposes. Bipedal gaits are hard to mimic, housing the central CPU in the relatively poorly protected cranium is dangerous, and having only two manipulating arms is just wasteful.

But it would take a harder heart than mine not to admit that there's a little thrill in seeing Honda's ASIMO making its first steps, or some of the new exoskeleton designs coming out to help the frail and the foot-soldier. Just leave off the Terminator design please.

9. Inkjet printing
Iain Thomson: Inkjet printing is one of the least appreciated fantastic technologies that surrounds our daily lives. When you think about it the technology is mindboggling. Some use piezoelectric crystals, naturally occurring crystals that change shape when electricity is supplied, to force ink through the printing nozzles.

Others vaporise the inks with an incredibly hot plate so that they spray out in an orderly fashion. The printing nozzles themselves are masterpieces of engineering; tiny apertures arranged in a precise order that would have Leonardo da Vinci tearing his hair with envy.

All of this is available to a buyer with $50 in their pockets, and the results are largely fantastic. When you think how long it took a medieval monk to copy out a single page of script, there's something wonderful about being able to print out something even better in seconds.

Before you dismiss me as a total printing geek, however, I would point out that there's also another sort of 'thrill' in inkjets: getting royally shafted. Printer ink is more expensive than cocaine and there's something very wrong about an industry that gives away an engineering marvel just so it can make money on the supplies it uses.

Shaun Nichols: Iain makes an excellent point, and I'm not just saying that because he's my boss. With inkjet printing you are able purchase an incredibly precise piece of electrical engineering for little more than the cost of its raw materials and assembly. Then you turn around and pay outrageous sums of money for little cannisters of the coloured dust that it shoots on to paper.

Then again, look at the alternatives. Laser printers are still for the most part expensive behemoths rarely seen outside offices, and the retro appeal of the old dot-matrix printers wear off pretty quick, usually after having to read several pages of the documents they create.

Better technologies may be in the works but, for the foreseeable future, inkjet printing is the way to go, rip-off inks and all.

8. Nanotechnology
Shaun Nichols: Aside from its potential use as a diabolical super-villain tool, nanotech is a very cool development. While miniaturisation of electronic components has been going on since the 1960s, nanotech takes it to a completely different level by allowing scientists to engineer on a molecular level.

The potential uses of this technology would take up an article in themselves, but for the IT industry this could mean exponentially smaller components, which in turn means exponentially faster and more efficient devices.

There is also the potential use in biotechnology. Smaller and more efficient computing hardware can allow for less invasive and safer treatments and implants.

Iain Thomson: Just as Shaun would have liked to see robotics placed higher, I would have preferred this topic to be much further up the list. Nanotechnology has the same potential to revolutionise human existence as industrial mass production did for our forebears.

Widespread and cheap nanotechnology would allow for quantum computing, highly efficient batteries, ultra-strong building materials and new medical devices that could see us living a lot longer.

But put yourself in the shoes of a nanotech engineer. Being able to build on an atomic scale, placing individual atoms where and how you want them is a power akin to that of the gods, and I'll bet that underneath the sober white coats the scientists doing this are thrilled to their very core.

7. Peer-to-peer
Iain Thomson: The first time I used peer to peer technology I literally couldn't believe it wasn't someone trying to wind me up. It was shortly after Napster hit the internet, and the very concept of all that data freely available was enough to boggle the mind.

Of course, my pirating days are long behind me and it's wrong kids, m'kay? But the beautiful elegance of the P2P concept remains deeply thrilling. All of those P2P nodes represent people, sharing their computer's resources and data with each other in a huge network that is not only highly efficient but very damage tolerant.

It's a perfect metaphor for the internet as a whole, and there are some who want to apply the concept to society as a whole. I wish them luck; that kind of behaviour got you nailed up 2,000 years ago.

The other deep thrill of that first encounter with P2P was in its use, i.e. sticking it to the record companies. After years of getting screwed time and time again by record companies with albums that proved to be two or three good tracks surrounded by fillers, and getting overcharged because the recording companies colluded to keep prices artificially high, it felt good to take something back.

The results haven't been pretty for the record companies and maybe people are taking things too far now, but my goodness it felt good at the time.

Shaun Nichols: If you are a record company or film studio executive, then you're likely to be less than thrilled with P2P technology. For the rest of us, however, P2P touches on a very basic virtue of computing; it empowers average people to do things that had previously been limited to a select few.

Just as the first PCs allowed people to process and create on a new level, and the internet allowed people to communicate on a new level, P2P allows us to share data on a direct level, without the need for a host or gatekeeper.

As expected, people have used it for less than legal means. I do understand that content providers are unhappy about not getting paid for the use of their products, but the attitude that the record labels have taken is outrageous. We don't blow up the highway every time someone has a car accident. Police don't raid cutlery stores whenever someone gets stabbed.

Aside from that, the worst thing you can do to quell a rebellion is to randomly go after a few people. Every time a kid gets sued for downloading music, support for P2P grows and more people tell the labels to just beat it.

6. Lithium ion
Shaun Nichols: The now ubiquitous lithium ion battery has been taken for granted in recent years, but imagine life without it. Laptop PCs and mobile phones would be far less prevalent, and those that did exist would cost a fortune and would need to be charged almost hourly.

The notebook market owes much of its current size to lithium cell technology. Many of the first portable computers, such as the Macintosh Portable, used lead acid batteries that helped make the system weigh in at upwards of 15lbs. Imagine lugging that around a convention floor all day.

Seeing how prevalent portable computing devices are today, I think we all owe the humble lithium ion battery a bit or gratitude.

Iain Thomson: Agreed on the gratitude, unless you are one of the very rare individuals who ends up with an exploding laptop.

Lithium ion batteries, and lithium polymer, are a boon to computing. The ability to take a laptop and run it for a working day between charging is a major boost to the laptop industry. Having a phone that can last up to a week between charges is even better.

The first laptops, with their clunky, inefficient batteries, were like bricks to lug around and had a useful life away from a power socket similar to a suicidally depressed mayfly. As for phones, watch Oliver Stone's Wall Street and marvel at the 'high tech' mobile phones used in the 1980s.

5. Spreadsheets
Iain Thomson: I can hear the sound of jaws hitting keyboards as I write this. Spreadsheets? is this guy serious? The most boring application known to man, with the possible exception of PowerPoint?

But bear with me. Spreadsheets are a stunning application when you think about it. In the days of yore, when Shaun was just a glint in his parents' eyes, spreadsheets had to be done by hand. Armies of terminally bored accountancy staff sat in offices slaving away making millions of manual calculations in work that makes watching paint dry interesting.

Then along comes this computer thingy that takes all the grind out of the process. All of a sudden companies can game out the effects on the bottom line of cutting prices by one per cent and get the result in seconds rather than days. The spreadsheet revolutionised the whole science of doing business, and enabled vast new swathes of business practice. This is indeed thrilling stuff.

Shaun Nichols: Iain suggested this one while we were eating lunch at a local deli, and I was pretty sure that someone had slipped the wrong kind of mushrooms into his cobb salad.

After some explanation though, I saw his point. Spreadsheets have really democratised the practice of accounting. I entered high school just around the time spreadsheet programs were first taught in maths classes, and I remember my teacher pointing out that we were performing calculations which he hadn't been able to learn until his second year of university.

As I mentioned before, the most thrilling thing about computing is that it allows just about anyone to do things that in the past required years of training and often cost thousands of dollars. Spreadsheet programs are a shining example of this.

4. Multi-core computing chips
Shaun Nichols: The idea of multi-thread computing has been around since the days of the first supercomputers. By adding multiple processing units, computers could divide the workload and complete the entire task much faster.

For decades, this was done by tossing multiple processors into a system. Not a huge problem when you're talking about giant multimillion dollar supercomputer clusters, but a major problem to the rest of us who like our computers to be smaller than our desks.

The high cost and hearty power appetite of the CPU limited most computers to just one processor, and even the highest-end desktop systems had only two chips. Then came multi-core technology.

By putting two computing cores on a single chip, chipmakers can more or less add a second processor without the high costs and power limits. This made multi-thread computing cheaper and allowed more powerful desktop and notebook systems.

If you ever doubt just how thrilling multi-core chips can be, try exporting a video file on an old single-core system. When it's done, you'll moonwalk with joy back to a multi-core machine.

Iain Thomson: Intel's recent advertising campaign may have poked fun at its own geekiness, but it wasn't a million miles from the truth. That we've reached the stage of silicon design where it's possible to put as eight or more processor cores onto a single piece of silicon is a stunning achievement.

To someone who grew up plugging single transistors into a circuit board to make a light bulb glow at the right intensity, the idea that there are millions of the things on a single chunk of silicon that I can slip into my pocket is astounding and deeply thrilling.

The men and women who don the full body suits and carve these marvels in clean rooms around the work are the artisans of the computer age. Forget the jewellers or artists who create useless ornaments; it is the chip designers who deserve the artistic laurels.

3. The iPod
Iain Thomson: I feel dirty just writing this. I'm not the biggest Apple fan but deep in my dour Scots soul the iPod does give me a little thrill, even if I feel a little ashamed of the feeling.

I was a very early adopter of digital media players. I was carrying around housebrick-sized chunks of hardware in the 1990s just so I could listen to my digital music collection on the way to work. These early models were uniformly awful, with lousy menu systems, clunky design and a battery life akin to a snowflake in a blast furnace.

Then along came the iPod. It looked really good, it had controls so simple my mother could use them and it had the first version of iTunes, which was really, really good, even if later editions have fallen away.

Later iPods just kept looking better and better, and the current iPod Nano is a thing of beauty indeed. Hell, I even broke my long-standing Apple embargo and started using an iPod Touch, although I didn't actually buy it but got it as a gift.

Given that a decade ago I was scrolling down track listings laboriously pressing a clicky button to move down a track at a time, being able to scroll through the entire library with a flick of the finger is a real pleasure, and one that I will give up when you pry the thing from my cold, dead ears.

Shaun Nichols: Some of us can vaguely recall the days when people had to listen to albums one at a time. Back in the days when portable music meant carrying around a discman and a big vinyl book full of CDs, the concept of having 100 albums to choose from was laughable. Now, you can have thousands of songs at the ready with a device that costs $99 and is about the size of a large coin.

I'm sure that, when the first portable media players were introduced, companies felt like they were getting into little more than a niche market. Even the mighty iPod struggled in its first years on the market. Eventually, however, people saw just how convenient portable media players were, and everyone from school kids to grandmothers began to sport the white earbuds.

2. The transistor
Shaun Nichols: Easily one of the most important inventions of the past century, the transistor is responsible for IT and consumer electronics as we know them.

Vacuum tubes are pretty cool for things like guitar amps and steampunk art projects, but they're pretty lousy for most computing applications. They're hot, bulky and incredibly fragile.

In 1951, William Shockley solved all three of these problems in one fell swoop by creating the transistor. The transistor was able to replace vacuum tubes and, in the process, allow for the development of computers that could actually fit inside a single room.

From then on, computers have been shrinking, down to the handheld smartphones of today.

Iain Thomson: Like the late, great Arthur C Clarke I've a bit of a grudge when it comes to transistors. He saw satellites as the springboard for man into space, since we would need to maintain large work crews in space to service the millions of vacuum tubes needed to make satellites work. Then the transistor came along and ruined everything and we're still largely stuck at the bottom of the gravity well.

But there's no denying that the transistor is a device of such basic simplicity as to thrill the soul. Shockley was a bit of a nutter when it came to his support of eugenics and the idea that anyone with an IQ of under 100 should be paid not to reproduce. But I'm willing to bet that when his team at Bell Labs found they could build transistors that worked, he must have had an Archimedes moment. Thank goodness he wasn't in the bath when he heard.

1. TCP/IP
Iain Thomson: As I warned you in the introduction we are geeks. Who else would put a communications protocol as the most thrilling piece of technology on the planet? Our parents must be so proud.

But TCP/IP is stunningly good technology, and is a deserved winner of this week's list. It is such an elegant concept in itself, establishing base level protocols that allowed pretty much any network to communicate and share data with any other. These connections were given the added value of granularity by allowing the layering of data. It's a seemingly simple but revolutionary concept.

But even more thrilling is the results of this technology. Ever since the IT industry adopted TCP/IP protocols the internet has been made possible. To think that this sprawling online collection of humanity comes down to a few simple protocols thought up by a couple of geniuses staggers the mind and thrills the soul.

Shaun Nichols: For an environment that is so fluid and caught up in the latest and greatest, it's stunning to think that the basis of the internet is a system that has changed very little in the past 30 years.

The TCP/IP system set the standard format in which various networks can communicate among one another. It also established the layering system that allowed the transmission of various types of data. Without this protocol, we might still be stuck on systems such as ARPANET, and most of you would not be reading this right now.

For the entire world to talk, a common language needs to established, and that basic language is TCP/IP. Without it, there's nothing to connect networks, which means no web, which means no web sites or services, which means most of us are out of a job. Seeing as how I can't pay my rent without it, I'd say I'm pretty thrilled with TCP/IP.