Analogy

I’m puzzling out a thorny computer problem by consulting the best authority I can find. It’s my dogeared, well-perused copy of the Complete Authoritative and Perpetual Guide to Computing.

The person who gave it to me hand-copied it from one belonging to a friend of hers, who hand-wrote his copy to make it a reasonable facsimile of a copy that one of his friends had, who translated his copy from a Windows 3.1 manual written an ancient dead language. That one written in the ancient dead language was a hand-written copy of a Windows/286 manual that was written in an archaic form of the dead language, and the compiler referred to his class notes about operating systems that he took in high school to fill in the obvious gaps. Where his notes were deficient, he reached into the deep recesses of his memory and thought he got it right.

Now, the pages of that Windows/286 manual were out of order, but while he looked over his class notes, the compiler hired a kooky homeless guy he had befriended to set everything straight. The homeless guy, who admittedly heard voices that no one else could hear, used the flaky fragments of part of a coffee-stained MS-DOS manual as a go-by, and where the MS-DOS manual was too fragmentary to be reliable, he consulted the manual for an Apple II+.

According to the provenance recorded in the flyleaf of my copy, that Apple II+ manual was cobbled together by combining a couple of pages from a QDOS manual with an early Unix manual, which itself was written entirely in C-language and translated into Pascal by a classroom full of ADHD monkeys on typewriters. So, my copy is no doubt much more authentic and reliable than anyone else’s copy.

Oops. I forgot to mention that the homeless guy confirmed with the voices in his head that the Pascal-translating monkeys were the ones who actually created computer operating systems in the first place, so anything they tapped out on said typewriters was, ipso facto, correct.

I’ll have this problem correctly resolved in no time, and no one will be able to argue that my conclusions or solutions are wrong.

Last Updated on September 25, 2024 by Anne