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Comment by minxomat | Hacker News Reader

Pipes are not exclusive to *nix based systems. Windows e.g. has had them for quite some time, dating back to at least DOS 7[0] from Win95.

[0] - http://www.lagmonster.org/docs/DOS7/pipes.html

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In early versions, DOS pipes weren't real pipes. It would run the first command and save the output to a temporary file; then once that was finished, run the second command with the file as input. I'm not sure when it gained real pipes.

Around windows nt/95 when multi-tasking was added would be my bet.

Windows pipes appear to still be second-class citizens. Look at this mess: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34504970/non-blocking-rea...

The eventual solution using SetNamedPipeHandleState isn't really supported: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3... "Note that nonblocking mode is supported for compatibility with Microsoft LAN Manager version 2.0 and should not be used to achieve asynchronous input and output (I/O) with named pipes."

But pipes were original and first to *nix based systems, first appearing in Version 3 of UNIX:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_(Unix)#History

So? The article mentions pipes as a distinctive feature of *nix systems. Neither it nor I claimed who had it first. The truth is piping from devices, programs and files is pretty much the same in Windows :)

I never said anyone was wrong; only pointing out the origins.

I think one might be able to successfully argue that NIX-like systems and the programs executed on them are distinctively* biased towards pipes.

Regardless, as you said, the point is moot.

No reference, but I'm pretty sure I remember it from DOS 5.

These are named pipes, not command line pipes. Windows NT was the first version of DOS that had them and they were copied from UNIX.

In Windows, specifically using |, the pipe is anonymous[0]. Named pipes can be created, but named pipes (fifos) on Windows are substantially different from those on unix. Named pipes are not relevant to the pipes my reference above introduces in Windows 95's DOS system.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_pipe

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_pipe

Windows NT was not a version of MS-DOS at all. This is why it had true pipes, of course. Their semantics largely came from OS/2, not from Unix.

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