/wayts/ 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 r
ATher sideways process), but it was frequently glossed as "West-coast Altern
ATive to ITS". Though WAITS was less visible than ITS, there was frequent exchange of people and ideas between the two communities, and innov
ATions 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 th
AT 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 origin
ATed there, and WAITS alumni
AT XEROX PARC and elsewhere played major roles in the developments th
AT led to the XEROX Star, the Macintosh, and the Sun workst
ATions.
Bucky bits were also invented there thus, the ALT key on every IBM PC is a WAITS legacy. One notable WAITS fe
ATure seldom duplic
ATed elsewhere was a news-wire interface th
AT allowed WAITS hackers to read, store, and filter AP and UPI disp
ATches from their terminals the system also fe
ATured a still-unusual level of support for wh
AT is now called "multimedia" computing, allowing analog audio and video signals to be switched to programming terminals. Ken Shoemake adds: Some chefistr
ATive body told us we needed a name for the oper
ATing system, and th
AT "SAIL" wouldn' t do. (Up to th
AT point I don' t think it had an official name.) So the anarchic denizens of the lab proposed names and voted on them. Although I worked on the OS used by CCRMA folks (a parasitic subgroup), I was not writing WAITS code. Those who were, proposed "SAINTS", for (I think) Stanford AI New Time-sharing System. Thinking of ITS, and AI, and the result of many people using one machine, I proposed the name WAITS. Since I invented it, I can tell you without fear of contradiction th
AT it had no official meaning. Nevertheless, the lab voted th
AT as their favorite upon which the disgruntled system programmers declared it the "Worst Acronym Invented for a Time-sharing System"! But it was in keeping with the cre
ATive approach to acronyms extant
AT the time, including self-referential ones. For me it was fun, if a little unsettling, to have an "acronym" th
AT wasn' t. I have no idea wh
AT the voters thought. :) [
Jargon File] (2003-11-17)
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