Peripheral Interchange Program

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The Peripheral Interchange Program (PIP), on the Digital Equipment Corporation's DEC-10 and PDP-11 computers was a utility to transfer data files. After some use, it was finally realized that the hand-crafted syntax

PIP destination:origin

actually was inverted from common English usage. Thus the

COPY from to 

syntax was born, one of the dozens of utilities that resided on the PDP and DEC machines. As late as the mid 1970s, PIP was in common use, along-side its descendant. After Gary Kildall started CP/M, he took the PIP and file concepts as well. The protean utilities which move data can also be seen in the UNIX

cp from to

which also ran on the Teletype workstations of the early 1970s and which survive in MS-DOS.