Diana Merry

Diana Merry-Shapiro was a computer programmer for the Learning Research Group of Xerox PARC in the 1970s and 1980s, after having originally been hired as a secretary.[1] As one of the original developers of the Smalltalk programming language, she wrote the first system for overlapping display windows.[2] Merry was also one of the co-inventors of the BitBLT ('bit block transfer') routines for Smalltalk,[3][4] subroutines for performing computer graphics operations quickly which were pivotal in the evolution of user interfaces from text-based computing 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 (PDF), 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.
  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". ACM Transactions on Graphics. 1 (3): 191–214. doi:10.1145/357306.357308.
  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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