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    And they're ancient relics (really, shells/text applications are still interacting over a device that emulates a tele-type writer over a serial line like they worked 40 years ago...) We still need them because there is no replacement :-( Commented Sep 20, 2011 at 17:55
  • Well, if you consider the terminal, I don't think you need much more than a stream of letters comming and going... Commented Sep 20, 2011 at 17:59
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    @Diego Sevilla The original unix inventor did away with tty/ptys in Plan 9 , and there a terminal pretty much does just use a stream of in/out data. But in *nix, the ttys are still around and used by consoles and terminal emulators to e.g. control terminal size, flow control, line buffering, special key events, and other stuff. Commented Sep 20, 2011 at 18:06
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    @nos: It turns out they're not the ancient relics we're lead to believe. Trying to do without them in Windows is rather painful in the end. The use of powershell remoting is hampered by one thing: interactive console programs don't work and can't be fixed to work right. There is no possibility of a reasonable text editor like either DOS EDIT or vi. Commented Dec 15, 2015 at 17:43
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    @Joshua Another evidence to the contrary is the original designers of Unix created the Plan 9 OS, where they completely did away with ttys, yet they achieved remoting in that manner (and much more) just fine. Commented Dec 15, 2015 at 19:23