/wayts/ The muta
NT 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 freque
NTly glossed as "West-coast Alternative to ITS". Though WAITS was less visible than ITS, there was freque
NT 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 poi
NT 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 developme
NTs that led to the XEROX Star, the Maci
NTosh, and the Sun workstations.
Bucky bits were also inve
NTed there thus, the ALT key on every IBM PC is a WAITS legacy. One notable WAITS feature seldom duplicated elsewhere was a news-wire i
NTerface 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 poi
NT 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 "SAI
NTS", 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 inve
NTed it, I can tell you without fear of co
NTradiction that it had no official meaning. Nevertheless, the lab voted that as their favorite upon which the disgru
NTled system programmers declared it the "Worst Acronym Inve
NTed for a Time-sharing System"! But it was in keeping with the creative approach to acronyms exta
NT at the time, including self-refere
NTial 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)
In addition suitable coNTeNTs:
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