
Communication Files: Interprocess IO Before Pipes [pdf] - mpweiher
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf
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Upvoter33
My reaction to this: Doug McIlroy is at Dartmouth!?! Cool. Worth figuring out
how to visit there, just

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luckydude
tl;dr: 3 years before Unix got pipes, a different OS (DTSS) got communication
channels. The channels have a master end and a slave end, the slave end acts
like a normal file descriptor, the master end is run by a process, much like a
debugger that has breakpoints on open/close/read/write/lseek/close. Except
that the syscalls on the slave side result in "breakpoints" on the master side
so the master can do whatever it wants in response to the events.

Pretty neat idea but much more complex than Unix pipes.

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mpweiher
Contemporary (2017) article by Doug McIllroy discussing a more capable IPC
mechanism that predates the Unix pipes he championed.

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jankedeen
streams and unix sockets.

