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50th Anniversary of BitBLT


Attached: 1 image I declare that today, Nov. 19, 2025 is the 50th anniversary of BitBLT, a routine so fundamental to computer graphics that we don't even think about it having an origin. A working (later optimized) implementation was devised on the Xerox Alto by members of the Smalltalk team. It made it easy to arbitrarily copy and move arbitrary rectangles of bits in a graphical bitmap. It was this routine that made Smalltalk's graphical interface possible. Below is part of a PARC-internal memo detailing it:

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