Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles
available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. WAITS was a
heavily-modified variant of Digital Equipment Corporation's Monitor
operating system (later renamed to, and better known as TOPS-10) for the
PDP-6 and PDP-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"; 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.
