alt Hacker NewsOne of the few living oldschool UNIX legends still alive.
Here is when he was young:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0
Kind of explains in an epic manner why pipes were useful back then.
They are still useful, but computers are so much more powerful that many techniques back then came primarily because their computers were not as powerful. I still, oddly enough, prefer the hardware of the 1970s, 1980s, almost early 1990s too. Today's hardware is much better, but I am nowhere as interested in it; it is now just like a common tool.
The Unix command-line composition-via-pipes workflow has no particular connection to hardware capabilities whatsoever.
is useful whether you have a 25Mhz uniprocessor or 1024 cores running at 8GHz.It is true that the unix pipe model is explicitly designed around text as the data format, and it is true that there's lot of data on computers in 2026 that is not sensibly represented as text. But there's also lots that is, and so the pipe model continues to be valuable and powerful.