And a patch panel and a bunch of patch cables that you plug in and out to construct your pipelines.

And eventually hire people whose job it is to patch pipelines on demand for everyone in the office.

“Hey Jim, I’m gonna output the systemd logs of nginx on line five, can you assemble a grep pipeline for me to match all HTTP 500 status codes from /api/cart POST request log lines? Connect the filtered output to Tim’s desk, line 7. He’s there now, we are trying to figure something out.”

“Sure thing Bob, give me a moment.”

It’s OK: you can just tell us you have a financially and relationally crippling Eurorack addiction. You’re amongst friends here.

I'm sure this is how some bellheads (in the phone tradition, not in the Unix tradition) envisioned computing.

Now if that isn’t a great Zachlike game mechanic. Playing as the patch pipeline builder.

Patching cables is so primitive... Use punched cards to define the connection patterns or something!

Somehow we’ve reinvented punch cards, but worse.

Bring back IBM accounting machine plugboards!

Transputerpunk.