They really are “Pipes”
I wasn’t looking for it, but this might be the oldest reference to electronic communication paths as “pipes”. This history page of the top 100 posts of the BBS era has a bunch of examples like that.
I presume the history of using the word “pipes” in a communication sense comes from the actual use of pipes to talk between two floors in a building or on a ship. Even as recently as the 40s, talking throug pipes was more reliable for short range communication than electric lines.
This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 11:57 am and is filed under Basics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 22nd, 2008 at 9:00 pm
I totally missed this post on my last read, it is great.