I am happy to announce the first public release of the bit program,
   an INTERACTIVE, FULL COLOR image viewer and editor based on SGI GL.
   Besides typical touchup tasks, such as crop, rotate, smooth, etc,
   bit offers some unique features not available in similar programs,
   such as text and vector support and the separation of text and image.

   The following is the relevant sections from the man page. 
   -----------------------------------------------------------------

Pre-Release of May, 1993                                       BIT(1L)

NAME
   bit - Bitmap Image Touchup for SGI Workstations

DESCRIPTION
  bit is an interactive full color image viewer and editor based on
  Silicon Graphics GL. As a full color program, bit handles images of both
  24bits and color index in a natural and efficient manner.

  As an image viewer, bit allows list of images to be displayed in their
  original type (24bits or color index) in any order and in any of the
  many built-in styles of display. You can walk up and down the list using
  mouse and keyboard, or you can let bit do the walk for you (The
  SlideShow).  With the pan and zoom features, large images can be viewed
  in full without being limited by the window or screen size.

  As an image editor, bit performs a large number of image editing and
  processing tasks accurately and efficiently. It keeps information loss
  at any stage of the editing process at an absolute minimum by performing
  subpixel sampling automatically while conserving the input image type
  whenever possible to avoid unnecessary promotion and/or quantization of
  input images. You can also cut a piece of an image and paste it into
  another.  In addition, arbitrarily colored and sized text and simple
  geometric figures can be rendered on top of an image for annotation with
  the option to make them part of the bitmap or output separately to take
  advantage of the higher printer resolutions (e.g. PostScript).

  Bit can also be used as a graphical user interface to many existing
  image processing programs by defining external bindings which in essence
  turn command line oriented programs into bit subfunctions and can be
  accessed by a press of a button, and best of all, the processed image
  will be read back and displayed immediately. Convolution using exter-
  nally defined matrices of arbitrary order can be performed dynamically
  giving great flexibility in processing an image.

FEATURES

  Bit performs all of its image manipulations interactively with a
  continuous progress report, and once the processing is complete, 
  the processed image will be displayed.

  Current features include

  o Rotates an image by an arbitrary angle with the option of anti-aliasing
    and filling the "rotated out" region with an arbitrary color.

  o Scales an image by arbitrary factors in x- and/or y-directions with
    the option of subpixel sampling.

  o Renders text of arbitrary color, size or orientation on top of an
    image with the option of rendering directly into the raster or saving
    the text and raster separately, such as into a PostScript file, to
    take advantage of a higher printer resolution. Besides normal text
    strings, many predefined special symbols can be input conveniently as
    in TeX(1), e.g., $\alpha$\small$\beta$ produces Greek alphabet alpha
    followed by a slightly smaller Greek alphabet beta.

  o Presents graphically the histogram of an image.

  o Performs arbitrary 1-to-1 pixel transformation.  The transformation
    function can be specified interactively and can be of arbitrary
    forms. Further, the transformation can be applied to RGB channels
    separately or simultaneously and to the entire image or a portion of
    it. Many difficult tasks, such as thresholding, can be accomplished
    rather easily by 1-to-1 transformation in combination with the avai-
    lability of graphical histograms of the image.

  o Places simple geometric figures (SGFs), e.g., arrows, circles, trian-
    gles etc., of arbitrary color, size and orientation into an image at
    arbitrary locations addressed either in absolute pixels or in some
    user definable coordinate system units, with the option of rendering
    directly into the raster or save the sgfs and raster separately (e.g,
    PostScript file). All SGFs can be scaled in x- and y-directions
    independently or simultaneously (this is how to get an ellipse from a
    circle).

  o Performs edge detection. In combination with image histograms and 1-
    to-1 transformation, very accurate result can be obtained.

  o Performs histogram equalization.

  o Performs convolution with externally defined (square) matrices of
    arbitrary order.

  o Crops a rectangular portion of an image.

  o Cuts and pastes across images.

  o Magnifies any portion of an image by any amount.

  o Displays a list of images in sequence with a user specifiable pause
    interval between images. (SlideShow)

  o Measures RGB intensities of a pixel at any location or all pixels
    along an arbitrary line with the result presented as RGB intensities
    or as an intensity vs. distance plot.

  o Performs image type conversions.

  o Converts image formats.

  o Smoothes an image (Special convolution).

  o Filters an image by external programs and read the filtered image
    back and display it.

  o Modify an individual pixel's RGB values.

  o Performs FFT on the entire image or a portion of it and display the
    resulting power spectra.

  o Spray and brush paint in full color (unavailable in this pre-release).

 SUPPORTED FORMATS
      o  IRIS RGB, native to SGI IRIS
      o  JPEG(JFIF) format
      o  CompuServ GIF
      o  PNM(Portable Any Map), including PPM, PGM and PBM.
      o  XBM (X Window Bitmap)
      o  TIFF
      o  PostScript(Write only)

Hardware requirements:
---------------------------------------------------------------
   Any SGI workstation that supports RGBmode(), including indigoes.

Where to get it:
---------------------------------------------------------------
   anonymous ftp to monte.svec.uh.edu   /pub/bit/bitxxx.tar.Z
   where xxx is the version number. Current version is 0.73

   Read src/01Readme for installation instructions after unpacking

Acknowledgement:
---------------------------------------------------------------
   JPEG support is based on the Independent JPEG groups's library Version 4.
   FORMS library, developed by Mark Overmars, is used for GUI.
   Both JPEG and FORMS library are included in this release.

---------------------------------------------------------------
  Bit is the program you will ever need to view and annotate
  images; The built-in editing features will satisfy most of
  your editing needs. In addition, the external filter and dynamical
  kernel will utilize any program you already have. So try it
  (and you will like it).