In 1975, Chen wrote [STO75]
The word "pipeline" and a sister term "streaming" probably originated with the IBM Stretch project (1954-62) which developed both the highly overlapped STRETCH and the radically different 7950 Stream Processor.
The earliest reference I could locate regarding the use of pipeline to computer processing was in Planning a Computer System: Project STRETCH [CAM62, p 204-5], where E. Block wrote:
The data flow through the computer [...] is comparable to a pipeline which, once filled, has a large output rate no matter what its length. The same is true here. Once the flow is started, the execution rate of the instructions is high in spite of the large number of stages through which they progress.
Tony Wesley
Comments to author: tony@tonywesley.com
Last Updated: November 26, 1995