To get perspective(we know what worked), here’s some 50+ years abstractions:

A file is a simple stream of bytes in Unix. (If you think what else it might be then compare to Multics’ segments). Separate processes that may be connected using simple standard I/O streams [pipe] (vs everything is DLL in Multics) — the concept of shell itself (policy vs. mechanism separation http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html ).

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/15685/wha...

For comparison, you need a new app on iOS for what might have been a shell pipeline (hierarchical file system is absent at user level).