Re: In need of documentation 2
Re: In need of documentation 2
- Subject: Re: In need of documentation 2
- From: Jonathan Feinberg <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2002 09:10:59 -0500
At 12:04 PM +0000 1/17/02, andybull wrote:
>
I always thought [blit] meant BLock (something) Transfer, but according to the
>
New Hackers Dictionary it turns out I was wrong ...
>
>
blit /blit/ /vt./
>
>
[snip]
Ah, but if you had followed the pointers, you'd have found
BLT /B-L-T/, /bl*t/ or (rarely) /belt/ n.,vt.
Synonym for blit. This is the original form of blit and the ancestor
of bitblt. It referred to any large bit-field copy or move operation
(one resource-intensive memory-shuffling operation done on pre-paged
versions of ITS, WAITS, and TOPS-10 was sardonically referred to as
`The Big BLT'). The jargon usage has outlasted the PDP-10 BLock
Transfer instruction from which BLT derives; nowadays, the assembler
mnemonic BLT almost always means `Branch if Less Than zero'.
--
Jonathan Feinberg email@hidden Inwood, NY, NY
http://MrFeinberg.com/