little Cupide stroue Within her bulke, because that she had woue The web that wrought Nastagio all his woe

Some companies were able to coerce one department's application to read data files written by another's. These lucky organizations often resorted to sneakernets—transferring data on magnetic tape or floppy disks—to avoid the re-keying process. With the advent of LANs and WANs, electronic file transfers replaced most sneakernets.

In “Treehouse Of Horror” episodes, the rules aren’t just different—they don’t even exist. If writers want Homer to kill Flanders or for a segment to end with a marriage between a woman and a giant ape, they can do so without worrying about continuity or consistency or fans griping that the gang is behaving out of character.

For example (humor me here), suppose that the Sneetches networked all their computers and discovered that, although the Star-Bellied Sneetches' computers talked to each other frequently and the Plain-Bellied Sneetches' computers also talked to each other frequently, a Star-Bellied Sneetch computer rarely talked to a Plain-Bellied Sneetch computer. The Sneetches could use a bridge to partition the Sneetchnet into two networks: the Star-Bellied network and the Plain-Bellied network. The bridge would automatically learn which computers were on the Star-Bellied network and which were on the Plain-Bellied network, and forward messages from the Star-Bellied side to the Plain-Bellied side (and vice versa) only when necessary.