Chapter 1. The Pipes Concept

To understand Yahoo! Pipes, the Web service manipulation tool, you first need to understand the concept of a software pipeline. The Unix operating system introduced pipes to programmers in 1972, but the germ of the idea goes back at least to 1964, when Bell Labs researcher Doug McIlroy wrote this in a brief memo, titled "Summary—What's Most Important":

"We should have some ways of connecting 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."