The Life and Times of Yahoo Pipes ⇥ retool.com

Glenn Fleishman wrote a wonderful history of Yahoo Pipes:

The interactive, web-based visual programming of Pipes — inspired by earlier interfaces — became a primary influence on a generation of UI/UX designers and products that followed. Its remix ethos matched the time, and led people to dream bigger. It seemed like it held some version of the possible—but with no business model behind it and no internal commitment to advance the product, it became a poster child for unrealized potential, like so much else at Yahoo.

I was pretty young but I remember putting together a handful of workflows in Pipes. I do not think I fully appreciated how novel it was at the time, though I recall missing it deeply when it was shut down.

What a great trip down memory lane, and presented in a very cool way. There is no “Chaos” slider but it also did not make my CPU work so hard it became sentient and asked me to wait a few minutes for a single webpage to load.