This morning’s Observer column marking the 30th anniversary of Gary Thuerk’s famous email mistake.

Looked at from the perspective of today, when my spam filter is reporting that it has blocked 5,700 messages in the last month, Thuerk’s unsolicited email seems touchingly innocent. For one thing it actually imparts some useful and interesting information.

If I had been an Arpanet researcher on the west coast in 1978, I would have been genuinely interested to learn that the network’s protocols had been incorporated in the operating systems of a major vendor. In that sense, it provides a stark contrast with the invitations to purchase penis-extending drugs, fake Rolexes and mining shares which nowadays clog my spam filter. And it’s sobering to see how such pernicious weeds can grow from such an innocuous beginning…