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The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (foldoc)

/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)