Georg Wrede wrote:
Just an example: MS-DOS had pipes already when regular PCs didn't have
hard disks. One could watch grand demos in trade shows, where the guy
piped stuff to sort, to find (their sorry version of grep), to more, and
to custom made filters.
What nobody told the user (until he had already bought a PC with MSDOS,
and he had tried to actually use the feature, unsuccessfully, and then
called the $10-a-minute hotline), is that the pipes were implemented so
that the first program writes the entire output into a temporary file on
the floppy, and once it has finished running, the next program then
opens the file as input.
Now, with the 0.00036 GB floppies of the day, it's not hard to see why
nobody ever got any real pipe work done.
I guess it was just a pipe dream, then. :p
--
Simen
