Sort of related, I had the dubious pleasure of using CMS(an IBM mainframe operating syste/userenviroment) for a while and it had an interesting take on pipes, fabulously overengineered. https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/SSB27U_7.1.0/com.ibm.zvm.v710.zv...

Making the natural comparison to unix pipes. I would say CMS pipes were better for complex pipe lines, the primitive names actually made sense and no need for that awkward setup stage on unix where named pipes need to live on the filesystem. But for simple pipes the unix syntax... felt better? Looking back on that manual now, simple cms pipes look fine, I don't remember why I felt they were worse than unix pipes.

Anyhow it is an interesting alternate take on what pipes could be.