1. WAITS
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.
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Definitions of WAITS
