"It was all very well to say 'Drink me,' but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. 'No, I'll look first,' she said, 'and see whether it's marked poison or not.' "

In 1932, on the 100th anniversary of Lewis Carroll's birth, G.K. Chesterton bemoaned the falling of Alice into the hands of scholars who would analyze her to death. Software developers are not scholars, but they seem to have absorbed some lessons from Alice in Wonderland, and we ignore those instructions at our peril. Where the brilliant and eccentric Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson had Alice growing and shrinking between "Drink me" and "Eat me" instructions, the brilliant and eccentric software community pushes us between the pillars of "readme" and posts of "readme1st" files in the shadowy niches of diskettes and CDs.

Changes frequently occur in applications after the manuals or help files are done, so last-minute changes are noted in "readme.txt" files. In some cases one wonders if certain facts are intentionally omitted from documentation and hidden in readme files, so that developers can avoid bringing problems and known bugs to users' attention until well after they've bought the product.

It is increasingly common for software to be sold without printed manuals of any kind. If we're lucky, the manual is on the CD in Adobe Acrobat format, so we can at least print it out at our own expense. More often, one must resort to consulting so-called "help" files, which, in typical wonderland style, seem to address every conceivable problem except the ones we actually encounter.

In Windows95 the readme.txt file lists 24 other text files of varying degrees of interest, but all of which are worth a look. When (I almost said "if," but I don't want to jabberwock you into unwarranted assumptions) you have problems with Windows you may find one of these files contains a solution, a workaround, or at least an acknowledgement by Microsoft that it knows the problem exists. Open Windows Explorer; select the Windows folder, then View, Arrange Icons, By Type. Scroll down and you'll see all the text files at a glance. Double-click the one you wish to read and it will open in Notepad.

Here's a useful tip I found in tips.txt: If you are at a command prompt and want a visual display of a directory (folder), type "start ." or "start .." and an open folder of that directory appears on the desktop. My favorite is the list of keyboard shortcuts. Here are two nifty ones: In Windows Explorer select a folder in the Contents panel, then hit the backspace key to go to its parent folder. To toggle between a command window and a full-screen hit ALT+Enter.

In Win98 it is essential to check the .txt files, which list compatibility problems and other glitches that may arise with specific hardware.

I'm sure you can find many parallels between the Alice books and the computer world. How about Bill Gates as the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass: "I don't know what you mean by your way.... All the ways about here belong to me."

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