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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.
WAITS alumni at Xerox PARC and elsewhere also played major roles in the developments that led to the Xerox Star, the Apple Macintosh, and the Sun workstations.
The early screen modes of EMACS, 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 computing, allowing analog audio and video signals to be switched to programming terminals. Also invented there were "bucky bits" - thus, the "Alt" key on every IBM PC is a WAITS legacy. One WAITS feature very notable in pre-Web days was a news-wire interface that allowed WAITS hackerHacker is a term used to describe different types of computer experts. It is also sometimes extended to mean any kind of expert, especially with the connotation of having particularly detailed knowledge or of cleverly circumventing limits. The meaning ofs to read, store, and filter APThe Associated Press or AP is an American news agency that claims to be the world's oldest and largest. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, who both contribute stories to it and use material written by its staffers. As of 2004, A and UPIUnited Press International UPI is a global news agency headquartered in the United States filing news in English, Spanish and Arabic. Once one of the three biggest news agencies in the world, with Associated Press and Reuters, it has dwindled in size and dispatches from their terminals.
This article is based in part on one in the Jargon File; early versions of the Jargon File are in the public domain.