Douglas McIlroy of Bell Labs, who had been working on macros since 1959, had been considering how to strng them together to create a specific output. And in 1963 (???), (???) Conway wrote an article in the CACM (???) about co-routines. Thus, the fundamental idea was not new, since pipelines are a specific form of co-routines.
When pipes were developed in 1972 for UNIX by Ken Thompson at the suggestion (some say insistance) of McIlroy, the "communications files" of the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System did very nearly the same thing. Neither group at the time knew of the efforts of the other. For information on the Dartmouth system, see Systems Programmers Manual for the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., 1971.
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