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 at advantive.com]
> Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2001 9:15 AM
> To: squeak-dev at 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
> 
> 
>