2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
|
|
|
WAITS
|
|
|
|
|
|
2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
|
|
|
/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. 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.
|
|
|
|
|
|
