IPC enables one application to control another application, and for several applications to share the same data without interfering with one another. IPC is required in all multiprocessing systems, but it is not generally supported by single-process operating systems such as DOS. OS/2 and MS-Windows support an IPC mechanism called DDE .

Interprocess communication (IPC) paper
This paper, written by a Stanford University student, discusses the implementation of interprocess communication in a messaging model.