The Pipe

[drhowarddrfine]

In 1964, Douglas McIlroy wrote a memo at Bell Labs. It contained one analogy that would reshape how programmes communicate:

We should have some ways of coupling programs like garden hose: screw in another segment when it becomes necessary to massage data in another way.

Nine years passed. Then Ken Thompson read it and implemented it overnight. One character: |

https://vivianvoss.net/blog/the-pipe

 

[AlfredoLlaquet]

That's a nice bit of trivia. Programs screwing other programs... Wait!

 

[eternal_noob]

I even add -pipe to my compiler's command line!

 

[kjpetrie]

And it's everywhere - FreeBSD, Linux, Mac, even Windows! No one told me why commands with long outputs could be viewed one screen at a time by adding " | more" when I worked with DOS or (if I remember correctly) Commodore Basic, but there it was - the pipe, quietly doing its job.

 

[atax1a]

we have, in fact, put that into our pipe, and smoked it.

 

[eternal_noob]