WAITS: /wayts/ n. The mutant cousin of TOPS-10 used on a
handful of systems at SAIL up to 1990. There was never an
`official' expansion of WAITS (the name itself having been arrived
at by a rather sideways process), but it was frequently glossed as
`West-coast Alternative to ITS'. Though WAITS was less visible than
ITS, there was frequent exchange of people and ideas between the two
communities, and innovations pioneered at WAITS exerted enormous
indirect influence. The early screen modes of EMACS, for example,
were directly inspired by WAITS's `E' editor -- one of a family of
editors that were the first to do `real-time editing', in which the
editing commands were invisible and where one typed text at the
point of insertion/overwriting. The modern style of multi-region
windowing is said to have originated there, and WAITS alumni at
XEROX PARC and elsewhere played major roles in the developments that
led to the XEROX Star, the Macintosh, and the Sun workstations.
Also invented there were bucky bits -- thus, the ALT key on every
IBM PC is a WAITS legacy. One WAITS feature very notable in pre-Web
days was a news-wire interface that allowed WAITS hackers to read,
store, and filter AP and UPI dispatches from their terminals; the
system also featured a still-unusual level of support for what is now
called `multimedia' computing, allowing analog audio and video
signals to be switched to programming terminals.
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