/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 rather sideways process),
But it was frequently glossed as "West-coast Alternative to ITS". Though WAITS was less visi
Ble 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 invisi
Ble 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.
Bucky Bits were also invented there thus, the ALT key on every I
BM PC is a WAITS legacy. One nota
Ble WAITS feature seldom duplicated elsewhere 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. Ken Shoemake adds: Some chefistrative
Body told us we needed a name for the operating system, and that "SAIL" wouldn' t do. (Up to that point I don' t think it had an official name.) So the anarchic denizens of the la
B proposed names and voted on them. Although I worked on the OS used
By CCRMA folks (a parasitic su
Bgroup), 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 that it had no official meaning. Nevertheless, the la
B voted that 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 creative approach to acronyms extant at the time, including self-referential ones. For me it was fun, if a little unsettling, to have an "acronym" that wasn' t. I have no idea what the voters thought. :) [
Jargon File] (2003-11-17)
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