WAITS
: /wayts/ n. 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 visible
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 invisible 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 IBM PC is a WAITS legacy. One notable
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.
