<i>&quot;The UNIX composition is only a novelty for those that never saw other OSes that surfaced at the same time. After all UNIX just adopted the idea from MULTICS.&quot;</i><p>One could certainly chain programs through intermediate files.  My understanding has it that pipelines were new in Unix, and Wikipedia agrees: &quot;The pipeline concept was invented by Douglas McIlroy and first described in the man pages of Version 3 Unix.&quot;