The Unix Heritage Society mailing list
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
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>

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1747 bytes --]

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

[-- Attachment #2.1: Type: text/html, Size: 3216 bytes --]

[-- Attachment #2.2: RGxkomgHdfzyhAUv.png --]
[-- Type: image/png, Size: 138780 bytes --]

  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

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=c9e880b1-e9b6-430d-ba95-8bad10607cbf@osta.com \
    --to=heinz@osta.com \
    --cc=tuhs@tuhs.org \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).