All Topics  
WAITS

 

 
   Email Print
   Bookmark   Link
 

 

WAITS
 
 
  Topics WAITS Topic Home

WAITS was a heavily-modified variant of Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering United States company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC ....
's Monitor operating system
Operating system

An operating system is an interface between hardware and applications; it is responsible for the management and coordination of activities and the sharing of the limited resources of the computer....
 (later renamed to, and better known as TOPS-10
TOPS-10

The TOPS-10 System was a computer operating system from Digital Equipment Corporation for the PDP-10 mainframe computer launched in 1967. TOPS-10 evolved from the earlier "Monitor" software for the PDP-6 and -10 computers; this was renamed TOPS-10 in 1970....
) for the PDP-6
PDP-6

The PDP-6 was a computer model developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1963. It was influential primarily as the prototype for the later PDP-10; the instruction sets of the two machines are almost identical....
 and PDP-10
PDP-10

The PDP-10 was a mainframe computer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation from the late 1960s on; the name stands for "Programmed Data Processor model 10"....
 mainframe computers, used at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) up until 1990; the mainframe computer it ran on also went by the name of "SAIL".

There was never an "official" expansion of WAITS, but a common variant was "West-coast Alternative to ITS
Incompatible Timesharing System

ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing System , was an early, revolutionary, and influential time-sharing operating system from Massachusetts Institute of Technology; it was developed principally by the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, with some help from Project MAC....
"; another variant was "Worst Acronym Invented for a Timesharing System".






Discussion
Ask a question about 'WAITS'
Start a new discussion about 'WAITS'
Answer questions from other users
Full Discussion Forum



Encyclopedia


WAITS was a heavily-modified variant of Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering United States company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC ....
's Monitor operating system
Operating system

An operating system is an interface between hardware and applications; it is responsible for the management and coordination of activities and the sharing of the limited resources of the computer....
 (later renamed to, and better known as TOPS-10
TOPS-10

The TOPS-10 System was a computer operating system from Digital Equipment Corporation for the PDP-10 mainframe computer launched in 1967. TOPS-10 evolved from the earlier "Monitor" software for the PDP-6 and -10 computers; this was renamed TOPS-10 in 1970....
) for the PDP-6
PDP-6

The PDP-6 was a computer model developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1963. It was influential primarily as the prototype for the later PDP-10; the instruction sets of the two machines are almost identical....
 and PDP-10
PDP-10

The PDP-10 was a mainframe computer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation from the late 1960s on; the name stands for "Programmed Data Processor model 10"....
 mainframe computers, used at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) up until 1990; the mainframe computer it ran on also went by the name of "SAIL".

There was never an "official" expansion of WAITS, but a common variant was "West-coast Alternative to ITS
Incompatible Timesharing System

ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing System , was an early, revolutionary, and influential time-sharing operating system from Massachusetts Institute of Technology; it was developed principally by the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, with some help from Project MAC....
"; another variant was "Worst Acronym Invented for a Timesharing System". The name was endorsed by the SAIL community in a public vote choosing among alternatives. Two of the other contenders were SALTS ("Stanford AI Laboratory Timesharing System") and SINNERS ("Stanford Incompatible Non-New Extensively Rewritten System"), proposed by the systems programmers. 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.

WAITS alumni at Xerox PARC
Xerox PARC

PARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology....
 and elsewhere also played major roles in the developments that led to the Xerox Star
Xerox Star

The Star workstation, officially known as the Xerox 8010 Information System, was introduced by Xerox Corporation in 1981. It was the first commercial system to incorporate various technologies that today have become commonplace in personal computers, including a raster graphics display, a window-based graphical user interface, icon , f...
, the Apple Macintosh, and the Sun
Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. is a multinational corporation vendor of computers, computer components, computer software, and information technology services, founded on February 24, 1982....
 workstations.

The early screen modes of Emacs
Emacs

Emacs is a class of feature-rich text editors, usually characterized by their extensibility. Emacs has, perhaps, more editing commands than any other editor or word processor, numbering over 1,000....
, for example, were directly inspired by WAITS' "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. The system also featured an unusual level of support for what is now called multimedia
Multimedia

Multimedia is media and content that utilizes a combination of different content format. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms....
 computing, allowing analog audio and video signals to be switched to programming terminals. Also invented there were "bucky bits
Bucky bits

In computing, bucky bit in a binary representation of a character, is a bit that is set by pressing on a computer keyboard additional modifier key, other than ordinary shift key....
" - thus, the "Alt" key on every IBM PC
IBM PC

The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform ....
 is a WAITS legacy. One WAITS feature very notable in pre-Web days was a news-wire interface that allowed WAITS hackers to read, store, and filter AP
Associated Press

The Associated Press is an Media of the United States news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, Radio station and Television station stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staffers....
 and UPI dispatches from their terminals.

External links