I remember working that one out with my brothers. Every step you take just leads to further problems getting the fish. It was easy to figure out to put the towel over the perfectly towel-sized grate and hang your robe on the hook. Blocking the cleaning robot access panel with Ford’s satchel also seemed to make sense as well. But when we put the stack of junk mail on the satchel and it actually worked? Well holy shit, were we ecstatic. It opens up some of the best parts of the game, though I would argue not as much as figuring out how to get the spare improbability drive to work. I think one of my brothers bought that same guide book long after we retired the C64, so though he knew how to finish it, I don’t think any of us ever did. I remember getting to Magrathea and not ever being able to figure out the proper tool bit. Tried taking the proper tool, and storing another tool in the thing your aunt gave you, but never seemed to work.
I have an older PC running as a file server using an Asus mobo raid controller that I’ve been afraid of updating. It also is the newest PC I have that still has an optical drive. I found some old discs I wanted to recover the data from, but Windows decided it could see the optical drive and assign it a drive letter, was happy with the driver, but did not want to actually read any discs. Fortunately, I too had a Cinnamon Mint USB on my desk, and a very old laptop with an optical drive that had an unbootable Windows 7 install on it. Fired it up and had it on the network and copying files from a DVD-R to my NAS in just a few minutes! Laptop is now running Mint and performs well :)