I recently got an Atari ST emulator running on my laptop and noticed something curious...there was a menu option on the desktop called "Blitter" which IIRC sped up the graphics display. I wonder if anyone here knows if this has any relationship to BitBlt?
This feature is much newer than the programming related hardware/etc documentation I have (from 1986/87) on that machine but in the owners manual for MegaSTe (from 1990)
[ Ahh... for the days when an owner's manual had things like IO port pinouts.....]
it says:
"BLiTTER
The BLiTTER co-processor chip in the MEGA STe computer greatly improves the speed of text and graphic displays." [etc.]
There are Atari web sites you can search if you really want to know this stuff... and in fact, you can find information to answer your question here:
http://www.atari-st.lovely.net/atari-st-docs/hardware/BLITTER.TXT
which says, in part,
"The Atari ST Bit-Block Transfer Processor (BLiTTER) is a hardware imple- mentation of the bit-block transfer (BitBlt) algorithm. "
etc. including a reference to Smalltalk.
Hope this helps :-).
-Andy-