[TUHS] First appearance of named pipes

[Rob Pike]

Always bemused me that to get a named local I/O connection one ended
up with "Unix domain (what does that even mean?) sockets" rather than
named pipes, especially since sockets are about as natural a Unix
concept as lawn mowers. I've been told, but haven't confirmed, that
early sockets didn't even support read and write. They still don't
support open and close, and never will.

Networks are not intrinsically more special than any other I/O
peripheral, but they have become gilded unicorns mounted on rotating
hovercrafts compared to the I/O devices Unix supported before them.

-rob

On Sun, Mar 8, 2020 at 3:48 AM Derek Fawcus
<dfawcus+lists-tuhs at employees.org> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Mar 07, 2020 at 01:17:09PM +0100, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> >
> > Interestingly, Luderer also refers to a 1978 paper by Steve Holmgren (one of the Arpa Unix authors), suggesting ’sockets’ (in today’s parlance) for interproces communication.
>
> Could that simply be bleed over of terminology from the ARPAnet / Internet
> usage, in that "socket" is used to refer to protocol end points?
>
> i.e. see these from 1970:
>
>   https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc54
>   https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc55
>   https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc60
>
> DF