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3.3 KiB
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24 lines
3.3 KiB
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="no"?>
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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>WAITS</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="../../jargon.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.0"/><link rel="home" href="../index.html" title="The Jargon File"/><link rel="up" href="../W.html" title="W"/><link rel="previous" href="wabbit.html" title="wabbit"/><link rel="next" href="waldo.html" title="waldo"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">WAITS</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="wabbit.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">W</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="waldo.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><dt><a id="WAITS"/><dt xmlns="" id="WAITS"><b>WAITS</b>: <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="pronunciation">/wayts/</span>, <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="grammar">n.</span></dt></dt><dd><p> The mutant cousin of <a href="../T/TOPS-10.html"><i class="glossterm">TOPS-10</i></a> used on a
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handful of systems at <a href="../S/SAIL.html"><i class="glossterm">SAIL</i></a> up to 1990. There was
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never an ‘official’ expansion of WAITS (the name itself having
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been arrived at by a rather sideways process), but it was frequently
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glossed as ‘West-coast Alternative to ITS’. Though WAITS was
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less visible than ITS, there was frequent exchange of people and ideas
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between the two communities, and innovations pioneered at WAITS exerted
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enormous indirect influence. The early screen modes of
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<a href="../E/EMACS.html"><i class="glossterm">EMACS</i></a>, for example, were directly inspired by
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WAITS's ‘E’ editor — one of a family of editors that were
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the first to do ‘real-time editing’, in which the editing
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commands were invisible and where one typed text at the point of
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insertion/overwriting. The modern style of multi-region windowing is said
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to have originated there, and WAITS alumni at XEROX PARC and elsewhere
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played major roles in the developments that led to the XEROX Star, the
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Macintosh, and the Sun workstations. Also invented there were
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<a href="../B/bucky-bits.html"><i class="glossterm">bucky bits</i></a> — thus, the ALT key on every IBM PC
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is a WAITS legacy. One WAITS feature very notable in pre-Web days was a
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news-wire interface that allowed WAITS hackers to read, store, and filter
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AP and UPI dispatches from their terminals; the system also featured a
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still-unusual level of support for what is now called <span class="firstterm">multimedia</span> computing, allowing analog audio and
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video signals to be switched to programming terminals.</p></dd><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="wabbit.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="../W.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="waldo.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">wabbit </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="../index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> waldo</td></tr></table></div></body></html>
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