This gloss of a key passage from “Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Approach” is inspired by Poul Anderson’s “Uncleftish Beholding”.

A reckoner bundle is made of hardware and bundlish software that work together to run wending riddlelists.

Enlightenment within the reckoner is forstood as clusters of twines (short for two rimes) that are understood in unlike ways, depending on the background.

Riddlelists are rewoven by other riddlelists into unlike shapes, beginning as ASCII scribes and then rewoven by builders and linkers into twoname runnables.

Flowmakers read and plead twoname riddles from the main wordhold.

As reckoners spend most of their time doubling givens twixt wordhold, input and output workthings, and the middle flowmaker (MFM) logs, the storage workthings in a bundle are laid out in a rank-listing, with the MFM logs at the top, followed by many ranks of hardware hoard wordholds, main wordhold, and ring storage.

Storage workthings that are higher in the rank-listing are faster and more dear per twine than those lower in the rank-listing.

Riddlers can bettermake the performance of their C riddlelists by kenning well and enplundering the wordhold rank-listing.

The runwarden kernel works as a go-between twixt the wending and the hardware.

It puts forth three groundish engrippings:

  1. Binders are engrippings for I/O workthings.
  2. Craftwordhold is an engripping for both main wordhold and rings.
  3. Flows are engrippings for the flowmaker, main wordhold, and I/O workthings.

Finally, networks put forth ways for reckoner bundles to speak with one another.

From the seepoint of a lone bundle, the network is just another I/O workthing.