/wayts/ The mutant cousin of
TOPS-10 us
ed on a handful of systems at
SAIL up to 1990. There was never an "official" expansion of WAITS (the name itself having been arriv
ed at by a rather sideways process), but it was frequently gloss
ed 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 pioneer
ed at WAITS exert
ed enormous indirect influence. The early screen modes of
Emacs, for example, were directly inspir
ed 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 typ
ed text at the point of insertion/overwriting. The modern style of multi-region windowing is said to have originat
ed there, and WAITS alumni at XEROX PARC and elsewhere play
ed major roles in the developments that l
ed to the XEROX Star, the Macintosh, and the Sun workstations.
Bucky bits were also invent
ed there thus, the ALT key on every IBM PC is a WAITS legacy. One notable WAITS feature seldom duplicat
ed elsewhere was a news-wire interface that allow
ed WAITS hackers to read, store, and filter AP and UPI dispatches from their terminals the system also featur
ed a still-unusual level of support for what is now call
ed "multim
edia" computing, allowing analog audio and video signals to be switch
ed to programming terminals. Ken Shoemake adds: Some chefistrative body told us we ne
eded 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 propos
ed names and vot
ed on them. Although I work
ed on the OS us
ed by CCRMA folks (a parasitic subgroup), I was not writing WAITS code. Those who were, propos
ed "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 propos
ed the name WAITS. Since I invent
ed it, I can tell you without fear of contradiction that it had no official meaning. Nevertheless, the lab vot
ed that as their favorite upon which the disgruntl
ed system programmers declar
ed it the "Worst Acronym Invent
ed 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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