50th Anniversary of BitBLT

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Happy BitBLT Day to all who celebrate https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/11/happy-bitblt-day-to-all-who...

Reminder to right-click, click "Get Clean Link", then open a new tab and paste to avoid jwz's anti-HN referral tracker.

oh, uh, can jump from mastodon then where I copied the link from, sorry https://mastodon.social/@jwz/115578171906975865

He refers to byte magazine's article on bitblt: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08/page/n185/...

Also XScreensaver's Blitspin hack: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08/page/n201/...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTtcwb-UWW8

What does this guy have against HN?

first time i get "*ickrolled" on HN

Didn't you read the page? "A venture capital company's fan club. Finance-obsessed man-children making the world worse." A previous version said, "A DDoS made of finance-obsessed man-children and brogrammers."

Worked for too many VCs.

Interview with Dan Ingalls here where he talks about inventing BitBlt

www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102738237/

First time I heard of BitBLT was the Win-11-breaking-ColorForth discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45953001

43FF's Law: You can measure software complexity by the number of nested for-loops.

The first for-loop appeared around in 1957 in FORTRAN.

In 1975, Smalltalk having two nested for-loops was a grand breakthrough.

Now in 2025, our most advanced AIs run on for-loops nested 6 or 7 deep. Who knows what the future may hold?

Fortran used to have DO loops. It still does, but it used to, too.

Algol's the one with FOR loops.

A routine often used for intellectual property theft*.

It will copy any image, irrespective of the copyright owners' desire.

*copyright infringement.

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