Matt Rickard has a whimsical post that really appealed to me. The idea, according to his title, is that every Unix command becomes a startup. His first example is grep. Grep’s a utility to search for a particular string in a series of files. That, of course, when extended to the Internet, became Google. He’s got a bunch of similar examples.Here’s another: rsync begot Dropbox.
As I said, it’s a whimsical but amusing post and it does make you think: perhaps all those successful startups really are merely extensions of Unix utilities from file systems to the Internet.
In any event, take a look at the post to see where all the popular Web sites really came from.