b. 1932, Newton, Massachusetts — Head of Bell Labs CS research; inventor of Unix pipes
Also known as: McIlroy, Doug McIlroy
Malcolm Douglas McIlroy was head of the Computing Techniques Research Department at Bell Labs from 1965 to 1986 — the group that employed Thompson, Ritchie, Kernighan, and the rest. His most famous technical contribution to Unix is the idea of the pipe: the operator | that joins the standard output of one program to the standard input of another. He pushed the idea for years before Thompson implemented it in 1973, reportedly in a single overnight session.
McIlroy also wrote some of the first Unix utilities — diff, sort, join, tr, echo, tee — and articulated what is now called the Unix philosophy: "Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface." This was originally published in the Bell System Technical Journal in 1978.
A famous essay records him writing a six-line shell pipeline to solve a word-counting problem Donald Knuth had solved with 10 pages of Pascal — an iconic demonstration of the Unix philosophy.
Video
Related people: Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan
Works cited in this book:
- UNIX Time-Sharing System: Forward (1978) (with Elliot N. Pinson, Berkley A. Tague)
Discussed in:
- Chapter 7: Pipes, Redirection, and Streams — The Pipeline
- Chapter 2: A History of Unix and Linux — The Unix Philosophy
