Just to clear some things up. The idea was invented by Doug McIlroy who said that we should screw computers together like garden hoses. This was in the 60s. They made unix pipes as a simple compromise. I wanted to make "screen" for plan 9 and because plan 9 has no TTY, you can do it just with buffered muxed pipes. It was a lucky insight into something cool. I invented nothing, I just tried to keep working in the great tradition of unix and share the implementation of ideas. By the way, ants.9gridchan.org is actually more interesting than all this patent bullshit. I'd rather have people take an interest in my current work than make a huge soap opera out of this. Advanced Namespace Tools for Plan 9 are pretty cool I think.