That Memo: did GNL's publishing system provoke an international crisis?

The Register's take on the furore following the Observer's publication of the "dirty tricks" email last week. The Register wants to know why we would retype an email. They provide various possible explanations. One of them: "We're not sure what kind of computer system the Observer uses, but we know that its sister paper, the Guardian, at least used to run on an electronic publishing system from hell where sometimes retyping really was the quickest way to get something into the system. ('You've got it on a Mac disk? A what disk?')".
Here's Stephen Pritchard's Reader's Editor piece.
(From The Register)