Diana Merry-Shapiro
NationalityAmerican
OccupationComputer programmer
Known for1st overlapping display windows and
BitBLT co-inventor

Diana Merry-Shapiro is a computer programmer who had worked for the Learning Research Group of Xerox PARC in the 1970s and 1980s, after having been hired originally as a secretary.[1] As one of the original developers of the Smalltalk programming language, she helped to write the first system for overlapping display windows.[2] Merry was also one of the co-inventors of the bit block transfer (BitBLT) routines for Smalltalk,[3][4] subroutines for performing computer graphics operations quickly which were pivotal in the evolution of user interfaces from text-based user interfaces to graphical user interfaces.

As of 2003, Merry-Shapiro was still using Smalltalk as an employee of Suite LLC, a financial consulting firm.[5]

References

  1. ^ Moggridge, Bill (2006). "The Mouse and the Desktop: Interviews with Doug Engelbart, Stu Card, Tim Mott, and Larry Tesler". Designing Interactions. MIT Press. p. 69. ISBN 978-0-262-13474-3.
  2. ^ Kay, Alan (1993). "IV. 1972-76: The first real Smalltalk (-72), its birth, applications, and improvements". The Early History Of Smalltalk. Archived from the original on 2009-05-07. Retrieved 2009-07-15.
  3. ^ Ingalls, Dan (November 19, 1975), Bit BLT (PDF), Xerox Inter-Office Memorandum
  4. ^ Guibas, L. J.; Stolfi, J. (July 1982). "A language for bitmap manipulation" (PDF). ACM Transactions on Graphics. 1 (3): 191–214. doi:10.1145/357306.357308. S2CID 12259003. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-11-02.
  5. ^ Babcock, Charles (April 28, 2003). "Smalltalk Gets Developers Talking: Interest in decades-old programming language grows as developers use it for Web applications". InformationWeek.


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