Source : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

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.
     
        [{Jargon File}]