Do One Thing

1. Unix shell solved one thing very well: (unary) function composition based on a text protocol. It gets complicated already when you want to beyond a pipe - e.g. A graph like a makefile. Then you need to leave the pipe metaphor in nost cases and deal with artifacts like files. Even more so, map-reduce was a big shift that went beyond the unic metaphor.

2. There was a different metaphor that had its merits: object composition through standard interfaces, e.g. OLE/COM and the likes. One might argue about its implementation (embedding a Visio object in a Word document still produces crashes, 25 years later), but as a UI metaphor it was very powerful.

3. The web's metaphor is coupling of disparate content through URLs and HTTP (and HTML). One of the most mind-boggling metaphors ever introduced to man (talk about doing one thing well). Today we use REST APIs as the atomic pieces (do one thing well) and Javascript/ObjectiveC/Java as glue. Same thing.

4. As for application it goes, "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp" (Greenspuns tenth rule). Slightly updated this means that as programs get more complex, they tend to become more integrated abd customizable, to the point where you use a high-level language to glue the different parts. If you're lucky they may have replaced a custom common lisp with a mature V8 engine, but the lore is still the same.

5. Outside of academia, people (product managers in particular) tend to be focused on solutions, not abstractions. And for good reason: solutions are often shortcuts for common applications of abstractions, and therefore they provide lots of value. File.ReadAllLines() vs. doing the same with 3-4 Java classes in the old days is the best example.

6. In the end, we need people to think about abstractions: unix pipes, map-reduce, URLs. And we need other people who think about solutions: The IPhone, the Google world etc.

7. As for the OP: curl might be a good start of a pipe. Add a program that parses tables, and a program that posts to REST APIs...

economic incentives typically lead firms to look for new sources of revenue. they hope to achieve this extra revenue with minimal cost, ideally by not creating new products or developing new customer relationships. the natural side-effect of this situation for software companies is that they add feature-upon-feature to existing products in an endless quest for growth. at the very end of the road this situation doesn't usually work out well for the product, the user, or the company.

on the other hand there are plenty of services/applications that keep stable interfaces for many years at a time. they do not extend themselves too far beyond solving the problem they originally tried to solve. we can all imagine what craigslist would look like in the hands of short-term profiteers, endlessly tweaking the interface for more ad clicks and "user engagement".

the success of sites like the original google search, craigslist, and HN proves that the "do one thing, keep it simple" model is successful and can often be very profitable in the long term. sadly, it is very easy to forget about such ideals when people are constantly dangling fresh money in your face and/or you have salaries to pay. while page rank might be considered the key element to google's genesis and explosion, we also owe much respect to the people that decided and continually insisted that the UI stay clean and minimal.

I don't care about content/download size ratio, I care about content (quantity and quality) in absolute size. Download speeds have progressed faster than page bloat.

Wikipedia didn't exist in 1999 (not for years, and even Slashdot was barely more than a gossip site. Good quality discussion back then was on usenet or irc. The concept of a 'mooc' was just a wet dream of some 'cypherpunks' and 'technoanarchists'. Download a manual for your microwave or car, do online banking, email anyone but your hardcore nerd friends? Forget it. Price comparison shopping, ordering something from another continent? Lol. I remember riding my bike to a local bank branch to pick up foreign currency, which I stuffed into an envelope and snailmailed. Had to ask at the counter of the post office how much the postage was, because there was no way to look that up online.

Mp3? Sort of existed, you could download song by song from geocities pages; that was before the crackdown that led to Napster even. But the "selection" was minuscule, compared to today.

Oh and back then, when you wrote a site, you chose between supporting ie or netscape, or browser sniffing and serving two versions, or sticking to yhe lowest common denominator which wasn't much, to put it mildly. Ffs people won 'best of the web' awards for html that worked on two browsers and didn't look like crap! Like obscure competitions today where you build a file that is both a pdf and a jpg! My first job, back around that time, was to 'port' a website from ie to netscape.

The more I think about, the more convinced I get - any claim that it was better in those days is just rose-colored glasses.

I don't mean this negatively, but I don't understand what point you're making...

Remember Usenet? Ah the good old days.