From: Heinz Lycklama <heinz@osta.com>
To: tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Pipes (was Re: After 50 years, what has the Impact of Unix been?)
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2024 08:17:01 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <c9e880b1-e9b6-430d-ba95-8bad10607cbf@osta.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <32bf4263-277d-8c8b-6bf7-e33df04a2c3c@taugh.com>
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John, thanks for the reminder of the implementation
of pipes on a constrained version of UNIX in the early
days. The exact implementation is described on page 2095
of the BSTJ July-Aug 1978 for interested parties.
Heinz
On 12/5/2024 8:00 AM, John R Levine wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Dec 2024, Dan Cross wrote:
>>> Pipes were invented at least three times I'm aware of, but what made
>>> them
>>> work so well in Unix is that they looked to the program the same as
>>> a file
>>> so any program could use them for input or output without special
>>> arrangements,
>>> and the shell made it easy to start two programs and pipe them
>>> together.
>>
>> Once you have coroutines and queues for passing data between them, a
>> lot of things start to look like pipes.
>
> They also can look a lot like temporary files. Someone, probably
> Heinz, did a shell for the tiny Unix that ran on floppies so this
>
> foo | bar
>
> actually did this
>
> foo > tmpfile ; bar < tmpfile; rm tmpfile
>
> to avoid having to swap programs in and out on floppies. The main
> disadvantage was that the tmpfile could overflow the tiny disks of the
> time.
>
>>> They were invented again at IBM in the 1970s and described in this
>>> paper. I wrote
>>> them a letter, which they published, saying that Unix pipes did the
>>> same thing.
>>>
>>> https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1147/sj.174.0383
>>
>> Don't forget CMS pipelines, too!
>>
>> Sadly, the Morrison paper cited above is not easily accessible, though
>
> If anyone else needs a copy, just ask.
>
> Regards,
> John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
> Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2024-12-05 16:17 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 36+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2024-12-04 3:17 [TUHS] After 50 years, what has the Impact of Unix been? sjenkin
2024-12-04 13:05 ` [TUHS] " Marc Donner
2024-12-04 13:40 ` William Cheswick
2024-12-04 15:02 ` Rich Salz
2024-12-05 3:08 ` John Levine
2024-12-05 15:19 ` [TUHS] Re: Pipes (was Re: After 50 years, what has the Impact of Unix been?) Dan Cross
2024-12-05 16:00 ` John R Levine
2024-12-05 16:17 ` Heinz Lycklama [this message]
2024-12-05 17:06 ` Marc Rochkind
2024-12-05 17:53 ` John Cowan
2024-12-05 18:05 ` John Levine
2024-12-05 17:22 ` Paul Winalski
2024-12-05 18:19 ` Ron Natalie
2024-12-06 2:29 ` Adam Thornton
2024-12-07 20:38 ` Ron Natalie
2024-12-05 16:55 ` Adam Thornton
2024-12-05 17:35 ` Chet Ramey via TUHS
2024-12-05 20:55 ` arnold
2024-12-05 21:12 ` Dan Cross
2024-12-05 21:50 ` Marc Rochkind
2024-12-05 22:03 ` Warner Losh
2024-12-05 22:19 ` Chet Ramey via TUHS
2024-12-05 23:07 ` Marc Rochkind
2024-12-06 8:16 ` Diomidis Spinellis
2024-12-06 0:46 ` Alexis
2024-12-06 21:46 ` Chet Ramey via TUHS
2024-12-05 23:07 ` arnold
2024-12-06 1:09 ` G. Branden Robinson
2024-12-06 1:31 ` Greg A. Woods
2024-12-06 2:05 ` Steve Nickolas
2024-12-06 16:44 ` arnold
2024-12-05 22:05 ` Bakul Shah via TUHS
2024-12-06 2:02 ` John Levine
2024-12-06 2:21 ` Dan Cross
2024-12-06 16:46 ` arnold
2024-12-06 2:26 Douglas McIlroy
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