The original Unix systems were really memory-constrained, and the standard utilities for processing text files often couldn't handle "long" lines (usually over

The original Unix systems were really memory-constrained, and the standard utilities for processing text files often couldn't handle "long" lines (usually over 2048 bytes, sometimes less). So the `cut` utility divided an input file up into separate files each containing a section of each line. To put the file back together, the `paste` utility would merge the sections of each line from those files back together.