Ha! How could I not reply to this for so long? Very slack of me, I apologise.

You're quite right – in many unexpected ways, DOS was further ahead than the windows behemoth (which is what I was referring to). The difficulty of piping GUI apps together drastically limited the ability of windows apps to scale with anywhere near the simplicity & flexibility of unix (or even dos, text based) systems.

I believe they've started re-addressing this in the last 5 years or so, with a “power” user version of dos shipping as a support kit for admins, buuut, it's still really bandaids on an architectural limitation. Developing a good GUI O/S, it's not for amateurs :)

Most people who use DOS batches are probably aware of the redirectors “<” and “>”, which are also tremendously useful, but the true pipe “|” is often misunderstood and not used.

As I recall though, you wrote some very small apps for me in the early 1990's when I worked at DIA, which created date-strings for use at command prompt levels. I used pipes to get them where I wanted then. Thanks for those, btw! :)

Looking at what you're describing, having lots of small programs doing small tasks to accomplish the larger task, reminds me of using the OS as a language like FORTH, where you slowly build up the language by creating small commands which do minor tasks, until finally you have one command that does what you want. I guess the OS (DOS or UNIX derivatives, or even CP/M for that matter, if you remember that far back) can be used in the same way…

– Jack