What is the primer proposal of a middleware pipeline?

To the best of my knowledge both node.js express and OWIN are based on Middleware, which are:

software components that are assembled into an application pipeline to handle requests and responses.

Cited in Middleware.

Despite being different and with almost 10 years between then, I can still find some similarities between the idea of Modules in ASP .Net and the Middleware based approach. Putting it simple, just like a Middleware an ASP .NET Module also decides whether to perform a certain action before or after the next component being invoked.

Since I believe there are many other technologic implementations following the same idea, I was wondering which one is the first proposal of a middleware pipeline?