If I remember correctly the Blitter was a special-purpose chip in the ST which did bit-blits in hardware.

Bob Jarvis Compuware @ Timken

-----Original Message----- From: Stephen Pair [mailto:spair@advantive.com] Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2001 9:15 AM To: squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org Subject: [OT] GEM, Blitter, and Atari ST (was: RE: Debian and SqueakL revisited again)

Chris Reuter wrote:

...

GEM was released under the GPL when Caldera bought Digital Research. The Watcom C compiler is due to be released as open-source software as well, although the current maintainers are still trying to remove third-party-licensed code.

Now that's a blast from the past. The Atari ST (running GEM) was the computer on which I learned GUIs and event driven C programming (with the Mark Williams C compiler) when I was a kid. 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?

• Stephen