WAITS

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	This is the JargonFile (V4.00) entry for WAITS - Next: waldo, Prev: wabbit
: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 WAITSs 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 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.
* (text is auto-included via JargonExtension by mutante using jargon with VERSION 4.0.0, 24 JUL 1996 - JargonFile by Eric S. Raymond is in the public domain)