Spellabyte was setting up a software company to compete with the mighty giants - Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.

Unfortunately, unlike those corporations, Prickly Spine Software couldn't afford MBA's to do his marketing, and until he got his venture capital money, he couldn't even afford programmers.

And unlike Google - he couldn't hire PhDs to write software either.

In the meantime he was making do with retired hedgehogs.

These old hedgehogs had very stiff prickly spines and rolled around in paper tape, which was read by an old paper tape reader, buffered to disk, and then burned onto CD-ROM.

The resulting software had a lot of interesting features, but was a bit buggy. However, the labels would clearly indicate that this was only version 1.0 and that customers who actually wanted to USE the software could download the latest version from the web. By then, he hoped, he would have enough money to recruit some retired spiders...

see also:- Animal Brands and Metaphors in the Storage Market