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BLT

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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”.

The Jargon File

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The crunchly saga

The infamous Crunchly cartoons by The Great Quux are woven into the lexicon, each next to an appropriate entry. To read them in the sequence in which they were written, chase pointers from here using the ‘next cartoon’ information in the captions.