Analogies

April 27, 2005

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.