WAITS
/wayts/ 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. Bucky bits were also invented there 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.
Ken Shoemake adds:
Some administrative body told us we needed a name for the operating system, and
that "SAIL" wouldn't do. (Up to that point I don't think it had an official
name.) So the anarchic denizens of the lab proposed names and voted on them.
Although I worked on the OS used by CCRMA folks (a parasitic subgroup), I was
not writing WAITS code. Those who were, proposed "SAINTS", for (I think)
Stanford AI New Time-sharing System. Thinking of ITS, and AI, and the result of
many people using one machine, I proposed the name WAITS. Since I invented it, I
can tell you without fear of contradiction that it had no official meaning.
Nevertheless, the lab voted that as their favorite; upon which the disgruntled
system programmers declared it the "Worst Acronym Invented for a Time-sharing
System"! But it was in keeping with the creative approach to acronyms extant at
the time, including self-referential ones. For me it was fun, if a little
unsettling, to have an "acronym" that wasn't. I have no idea what the voters
thought. :)
[Jargon File]
(2003-11-17)
Nearby terms:
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