It seems the date was 1986. What I find surprising is McIlroy's solution feels completely modern still, one could still solve the problem more or less in the sa

It seems the date was 1986. What I find surprising is McIlroy's solution feels completely modern still, one could still solve the problem more or less in the same manner today when writing a command pipeline on a unix derived os. Even the names and syntax of the commands hasn't changed.