Top 10 IT thrillers

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.