Analogies

I love using analogies for computers and technology. One that I particularly like— enough that it is one of my sigs— is attributed to Albert Einstein as follows: You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.

When asked by a client to describe how DSL can be provided by the phone company over the same phone line as his home phone, yet not use up his dial-tone, I came up with the following.

DSL is like a string between two buildings. You can tug on the string on either end and use Morse Code to communicate. But you can also attach a can at each end of the string and use the cans to speak between buildings. The tugs are your phone, and the cans are DSL.

Ok, so I'm not as clever as I think.