Quote from Doug McIlroy

“We should have some ways of coupling programs like garden hose – screw in another segment when it becomes necessary to massage data in another way. This is the way of IO also.”

Doug McIlroy, the eventual inventor of Unix pipes, typed this on October 11, 1964 — years before Unix existed and nearly a decade before | landed in it. It’s the closing item of a memo summarizing “what’s most important,” and it compresses the entire Unix philosophy into one image: small programs, composed on demand.

Page 10 of the original typewritten memo. Image saved from doc.cat-v.org/unix/pipes/pipe.png to preserve an important artifact.