There are some really great designers on the list, like Sophie Wilson and Gordon Bell, but the list of admirable machines comes up really short — and missing a lot of really significant and admirable machines.<p>Maybe these are the machines <i>bad</i> computer architects, like Alpert, admire. Alpert is notable mostly for leading the computer industry's most expensive and embarrassing failure, the Itanic (formally known as the Itanium), despite the presence on his team of many of the world's best CPU designers, who had just come from designing the HP-PA --- a niche CPU architecture nevertheless so successful that HP's workstation competitors, such as NeXT, started using it. Earlier in his career he sunk the already-struggling 32000, the machine that by rights <i>should</i> have been the 68000. (And maybe if they'd funded GCC it could have been.)<p>What about the Tera MTA, with its massive hardware multithreading and its packet-switched RAM, which was gorgeous and prefigured significant features of the GPU explosion?<p>What about the DG Nova, with its bitslice ALU chips and horizontal-microcode instructions? What about the MuP21, with its radical on-chip dual circular stacks?<p>What about the HP 9100, with its dual stacks and PCB-inductance microcode, where the instruction set was the <i>user interface</i>?<p>What about the LGP-30, which managed to deliver a usable von Neumann computer with only 113 vacuum tubes (for amplification, inversion, and sequencing)?<p>What about the 26-bit ARM, with its conditional execution on every instruction, and packing the program status register into the program counter so it automatically gets restored by subroutine return, and, more importantly, interrupt return?<p>What about Thumb-2 with its unequaled code density?<p>What about the CM-1? Anyone can see that AVX-512 (or for that matter modern timing-attack-resistant AES implementations!) owe everything to the CM-1.<p>And the conspicuous omission of the Burroughs 5000 has already been noted by others.<p>I mean, there are some good designs on the list! But it hardly seems like a very comprehensive list of admirable designs.