The final version, first shipped with the 5th Edition of Unix in 1974, was entirely written by Douglas McIlroy.
MH follows the Unix philosophy of write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface (Doug McIlroy).
In Normalized Systems vision, Douglas McIlroy's dream of constructing information systems based upon rational principles becomes a reality.
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The idea that software should be componentized - built from prefabricated components - first became prominent with Douglas McIlroy's address at the NATO conference on software engineering in Garmisch, Germany, 1968,
Practical efficiency and smaller variance in performance were demonstrated against optimised quicksorts (of Sedgewick and Bentley-McIlroy).