TMC-produced WAIS servers ran on their massively parallel CM-2 (Connection Machine) and SPARC-based CM-5 MP supercomputers.
With the advent of Z39.50:1992, the termination of support for free WAIS by Thinking Machines and the establishment of WAIS Inc as a commercial venture, the U.S. National Science Foundation funded the Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR) to promote Internet search and discovery systems, open source and standards.
Ulrich Pfeifer and Norbert Gövert of the computer science department of the University of Dortmund extended the CNIDR freeWAIS code to become freeWAIS-sf with structured fields as its main improvement.
Inspired by WAIS' "Directory of Servers", Eliot Christian of USGS envisioned GILS: Government Information Locator Service.
WAIS Inc. was originally a joint project between Apple Computer, Peat Marwick, Dow Jones, and Thinking Machines.
Other early clients were the Environmental Protection Agency, Library of Congress, and the Department of Energy and later the Wall Street Journal and Encyclopædia Britannica.
François Schiettecatte left Human Genome Project at Johns Hopkins Hospital and started FS-Consult and developed his own variant of WAIS which eventually became ScienceServer, which was later sold to Elsevier Science.
The Web's hypertext model permits the author more freedom to communicate the options available to the reader, as it can include headings and various forms of list structure.