Bit blit
- Date
- c. 1975 · confidence low
- Place
- Palo Alto, California, United States
- Credited to
- Diana Merry and Dan Ingalls (Xerox PARC)
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
Bit blit (bit block transfer, BitBLT) is a computer-graphics operation that combines several bitmaps into one via a boolean function, moving blocks of pixels between a source and a destination image. It was developed at Xerox PARC in the mid-1970s, in the Smalltalk environment, with Diana Merry among its authors.
What it led to
- Fundamental operation of graphical user interfaces (windows, icons, cursors)
- Hardware acceleration in graphics cards and GPUs
- Basis of modern 2D graphics libraries