Top 10 most surreal IT moments

First prize

Some say that the world of technology is a bit, well, dull. But like any industry it has its highs and lows, and there have been plenty of weird moments along the way.

With fast-living mad genius executives, overhyped product super-launches, and bizarre fads that take over the web, even the most buttoned-down elements of the IT world can get downright crazy at times.

This week, we take a look at some stranger moments in the history of computing and the internet. While not always watershed events, they are nonetheless memorable moments that left everyone scratching their heads.

Honourable Mention: Queen Elizabeth II - computer geek
Shaun Nichols: The Queen doesn't exactly make people think of the rapid pace of modern progress. By nature, the royal family brings to mind countless centuries of history and an aloof, highly insulated, existence.

Queen Elizabeth, however, is actually about as wired as an 82-year old monarch can be. She was one of the first people in the UK to send an email, and still enjoys using it to keep in touch with her grandchildren. What's more, she recently helped launch the royal YouTube channel.

Iain Thomson: There's a lot more to The Queen than frumpy outfits and corgis; she's a sharp person and her intelligence has done the monarchy well over the past 50 years.

She's remarkably tech-savvy in her way. She's got an iPod and a Wii, and has exhibited a keen interest in the growth of the technology industry. I'm not expecting a MySpace listing of her favourite beats, or getting regular tweets from Her Maj, but it's nice to know she's switched on.

Honourable Mention: The 'I Love You' virus
Iain Thomson: In May 2000 millions of computer users across the world thought they were in luck. Imagine the scenario. It's a cold Monday morning, the cat has been cheerfully clawing your eyes out since 5:30am as a reminder that it would like to hear the sound of tins opening rather than your nasal wheezing, and the commute in to work was a nightmare of which Dante would be proud.

Sandwiched in between yet another memo from HR covering best practice when breathing, and an interesting proposal of a financial nature with the nephew of a banker related to the King of Swaziland, is a simple email with the header 'I Love You!' Many people opened the enclosed billet doux, and realised that the world wasn't a fluffy bundle of love at all.

The I Love You virus spread like wildfire by copying itself via people's address books and sending itself on. Many people, expecting to see either exciting or embarrassing messages of love from friends and family, became part of the 10 per cent of global computer users infected.

The virus was one of the first to use social engineering effectively, and was far in advance of the Philippines legal system which could not prosecute the alleged writers because no law against virus distribution was on the statute books. It brought a dash of surrealism to our inboxes, and taught some computer users that everything in email isn't as it seems.

Shaun Nichols: Some of us young people who came up in the world of hacked MySpace pages laugh at the idea that so many people would fall for such a simple email scam. However, in 2000 'social engineering' was a term nearly unheard of outside psychology classes.

Apart from the obvious spam messages, emails from trusted sources were as good as the spoken word. Add to that the lapse in judgement that many people are prone to when matters of the 'heart' are involved, and you can see how the I Love You virus spread so quickly.

This was, of course, back in the days when a computer virus made prime-time news, so the general public was, of course, pushed into a wholesale panic. Hard to imagine, now that malware attacks are an almost daily occurrence.