History
The pipeline concept and the vertical-bar notation were invented by Douglas McIlroy, one of the authors of the early command shells, after he noticed that much of the time they were processing the output of one program as the input to another. His ideas were implemented in 1973 when Ken Thompson added pipes to the UNIX operating system. The idea was eventually ported to other operating systems, such as DOS, OS/2, Microsoft Windows, and BeOS, often with the same notation.
Although developed independently, Unix pipes are similar to, and were preceded by, the 'communication files' developed by Ken Lochner in the 1960s for the Dartmouth Time Sharing System.
The robot in the icon for Apple's Automator, which also uses a pipeline concept to chain repetitive commands together, holds a pipe in homage to the original Unix concept.
Read more about this topic: Pipeline (Unix)
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