What is a Blit or Blitting?

In the early 1970's, when computer graphics was in its infancy at Xerox PARC, a computer programmer called Dan Ingalls invented this term for a "Bit Block Transfer".

A computer display is seen by the computer processor as a chunk of memory arranged in rectangular columns and rows. A Blit will take an arbitrary rectangular lump of memory, defined by a source rectangle and copy it to another place defined by a destination rectangle.

Sometimes the source or destination rectangle will be in a portion of memory that isn't on the screen, such as an image held in memory. This is how images are drawn onto the screen or printer.

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