The name WAITS is a retronym for the PDP-6/10 Stanford A.I. Lab operating system software which flourished from 1966 to 1990. The WAITS operating system was one of the tens of large lumps of software at the dawn of time sharing in the 1960s. WAITS survived and evolved at Stanford for 25 years and died without any surviving successors. At Stanford Computer Science Department, WAITS was displaced by Unix. WAITS forked FOONEX and a short lived Livermore site; neither of which out lasted the 1990 end of WAITS.
WAITS, like its Eastern cousin ITS, supported time sharing, graphical user interfaces, real time control of experimental robotic equipment, nascent multimedia for audio voice recognition, audio for music generation, video for computer vision, video processing (second to JPL) for the first Mars orbital mission, Mariner-9, and generation of video for computer graphics. WAITS as Foonly supported the first Hollywood CGI film, Westworld 1973.
WAITS, like its Digital parent, came with a Fortran, an Assembler, and a debugger; all of which were superceded by programs named LISP, SAIL, FAIL, RAID and so on.
The first decade of Time Sharing technology included MIT AI with Digital Equipment, MIT and Multics with General Electric, BBN Bolt Bernack Newman. The East West software schism occured in 1966, when John McCarthy with Lester Earnest and Arthur Samuel moved the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project to the D.C.Power building and obtained a PDP-6 with the Digital Operating System named "Monitor". In 1968 a PDP-10 KA was installed as primary, followed by a KL in 1976.
| major version | first | final | configuration |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | 1966 | 1975 | KA10 two segments |
| 7 | 1975-04-23 | 1976-06-10 | KA10 BBN pager |
| 8 | 1976-06-11 | 1978-12-29 | KL10 |
| 9 |