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. Also invented
there were {bucky bits} -- thus, the ALT key on every IBM PC is a
WAITS legacy. One WAITS feature very notable in pre-Web days 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.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {glitch}{operating system}{SAIL}{TWENEX}]