WAITS

/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

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.

[Jargon File]