24 lines
1.4 KiB
Plaintext
24 lines
1.4 KiB
Plaintext
WAITS
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/wayts/ , n. The mutant cousin of TOPS-10 used on a handful of systems at
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SAIL up to 1990. There was never an official expansion of WAITS (the name
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itself having been arrived at by a rather sideways process), but it was
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frequently glossed as West-coast Alternative to ITS. Though WAITS was less
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visible than ITS, there was frequent exchange of people and ideas between
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the two communities, and innovations pioneered at WAITS exerted enormous
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indirect influence. The early screen modes of EMACS , for example, were
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directly inspired by 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 commands were
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invisible and where one typed text at the point of insertion/overwriting.
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The modern style of multi-region windowing is said to have originated there,
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and WAITS alumni at XEROX PARC and elsewhere played major roles in the
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developments that led to the XEROX Star, the Macintosh, and the Sun
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workstations. Also invented there were bucky bits thus, the ALT key on every
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IBM PC is a WAITS legacy. One WAITS feature very notable in pre-Web days was
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a 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 multimedia computing,
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allowing analog audio and video signals to be switched to programming
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terminals.
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