Unresearched Idea

[Preface]: I wrote this last week when I was supposed to be doing other stuff. It’s a little odd but I need content.
So I haven’t really used OS/2 except when it is running on an HMC on a z/series which is not a good example of a working OS/2 environment. One of the things I’ve heard about it that was fantastic was graphical pipes. I’ve been thinking about this for a while and I’ve been trying to imagine how that could work and be really useful. This is how I’m visualizing it.
When you are working or scripting in a normal unix environment you have access to lots of small useful programs that you can chain together to create tasks, cat, less, awk, etc. It would be nice to have precreated visual representations of these tools as widgets that you could visually chain together.
This kind of tool could be employed in two ways, one as visual scripting allowing an administrator (or a home user) to prototype scripts that they would like or need. You can imagine writing a pretty simple log parser quickly just dragging together and wiring up a visual cat to a visual sed object.
Perhaps this idea is more useful for actual application development. The tasks these little unix utilities handle for you are very useful in a CLI form but in many cases there is no equivalent widget for the same function. If you think about it scroll bars are similar to less, a text canvas is similar to cat, and a file selector embodies ls and cd. Where is the equivalent widget for sed and awk for example?
In either case this reminds me very much of javabeans (not enterprise javabeans). They allow you to visually create reusable interfaces yadda yadda. I think the missing piece of this is tying those reusable interfaces to unix tools that users are used to.
So there.