Yup early shell's equated ^ and | 

The problem was while the Model - 33,  post 1965 could print a vertical bar, as note 2 of page three of teletypes document: "33 Keyboard" General Description and Principles of Operations" ISS 4, Section 574-121-100TC (Issue 4, June 1974), the keyboard could not generate it.   

On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 3:43 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Thu, Dec 03, 2020 at 09:37:17PM +0100, Niklas Karlsson wrote:
> Den tors 3 dec. 2020 kl 21:32 skrev M Douglas McIlroy <
> m.douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu>:
>
> > There's a back story. The paper appears in the proceedings  of a
> > conference held in London in 1973, a few months after the advent of
> > pipes. While preparing the presentation, Ken was inspired to invent
> > and install the pipe operator. His talk wouldn't have been nearly as
> > compelling had it been expressed in the original pipeline syntax (for
> > which I take the blame).
> >
>
> Now I'm curious. Is there anywhere I can read about the original pipeline
> syntax? I tried searching a bit, but the only mention that was even vaguely
> informative only stated that > was involved.

Wasn't there a version that was

        cat whatever ^ wc -l

?