WAITS

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 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 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.