/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 WA
ITS (the name
ITself having been arrived at by a rather sideways process), but
IT was frequently glossed as "West-coast Alternative to
ITS". Though WA
ITS was less visible than
ITS, there was frequent exchange of people and ideas between the two commun
ITies, and innovations pioneered at WA
ITS exerted enormous indirect influence. The early screen modes of
Emacs, for example, were directly inspired by WA
ITS' s "E" ed
ITor - one of a family of ed
ITors that were the first to do "real-time ed
ITing", in which the ed
ITing commands were invisible and where one typed text at the point of insertion/overwr
ITing. The modern style of multi-region windowing is said to have originated there, and WA
ITS 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 IBM PC is a WA
ITS legacy. One notable WA
ITS feature seldom duplicated elsewhere was a news-wire interface that allowed WA
ITS 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 sw
ITched 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 lab proposed names and voted on them. Although I worked on the OS used by CCRMA folks (a paras
ITic subgroup), I was not wr
ITing WA
ITS 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 WA
ITS. Since I invented
IT, I can tell you w
IThout fear of contradiction that
IT had no official meaning. Nevertheless, the lab voted that as their favor
ITe upon which the disgruntled system programmers declared
IT the "Worst Acronym Invented for a Time-sharing System"! But
IT was in keeping w
ITh the creative approach to acronyms extant at the time, including self-referential ones. For me
IT was fun, if a l
ITtle unsettling, to have an "acronym" that wasn' t. I have no idea what the voters thought. :) [
Jargon File] (2003-11-17)
In addITion suITable contents:
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