[adsteel_]

The author says he scrolled past it quickly, so it "may have been an honest mistake," ie not malicious.

Unwanted? There's been a big cultural shift over the past 100 years about addresses. Papers used to print subjects' addresses alongside the subject. In the 80s addresses were still considered public knowledge via phone books. So maybe Douglas Adams didn't want his to be public, but he would have been in the minority. Either way, there's no evidence (here, anyway) that he gave it a second thought.

[EricE]

Indeed. Heck even VCRs were rare back then - how many people happened to record that and then thought to go back frame by frame to pick the address up?

It was an entirely different time indeed!

[Forgeties79]

It's less this specific act and more that just because you could easily locate numbers/addresses it doesn't really lessen the act of blasting it out for the world - nobody wants to be on the receiving end of that. Clearly it was an accident for this specific case, but I just found the previous comment way too flippant/hand wavy.