Creative Computing Benchmark
The Creative Computing Benchmark, also referred to as David Ahl's benchmark, was a computer benchmark used to compare the performance of the BASIC programming language on various machines. It was first introduced in the November 1983 issue of Creative Computing magazine with the measures from a number of 8-bit computers that were popular at the time. Over a period of a few months, the list was greatly expanded to include practically every contemporary machine that ran BASIC, topped by the Cray-1 which ran it in 0.01 seconds.
History
The benchmark first appeared in the November 1983 issue of Creative Computing under the title "Benchmark Comparison Test".[1] In the article, Ahl was careful to state that it tested only a few aspects of the language, mostly its looping performance. He stated:
Likewise, the benchmark program presented here is not representative of the way computers are actually used; it measures only a few aspects of performance, and no one should buy a computer based solely on the results of these measures. Yet, the results provide some interesting comparative data.[1]
The initial results were provided for common machines of the era, including the Apple II, Commodore 64 and the recently-released IBM PC. Most of these machines ran some variation of the stock Microsoft BASIC and thus provided similar times on the order of two minutes, while the PC was near the top of the list at only 24 seconds. the fastest machine in this initial version was the Olivetti M20 at 13 seconds, and the slowest was Atari BASIC on the Atari 800 at 6 minutes 58 seconds.[2]
In the months following its publication, the magazine was inundated with results for other platforms. It became a regular feature for a time, placed prominently near the front of the magazine with an ever-growing list of results. By March the fastest machine on the list was the Cray-1 at 0.01 seconds, and the slowest was the Texas Instruments TI ST-50 programmable calculator at 12.7 days.[3]
The benchmark had several problems that made it less useful for general purposes. For instance, the system did not test any string manipulations, who's performance varied widely across platforms. It also did not take advantage of any "speedups" available on different platforms, like the possible use of integer variables for loop indexes or turning off video access on machines with shared main memory.[a] These limitations were widely debated at the time.[5]
Code
The following is from later versions of the benchmark code, which reduced the number of compound statements on a line.[3]
10 ' Ahl's Simple Benchmark 20 FOR N=1 TO 100: A=N 30 FOR I=1 TO 10 40 A=SQR(A): R=R+RND(1) 50 NEXT I 60 FOR I=1 TO 10 70 A=A^2: R=R+RND(1) 80 NEXT I 90 S=S+A: NEXT N 100 PRINT ABS(1010-S/5) 110 PRINT ABS(1000-R)
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
- Ahl, David (November 1983). "Benchmark Comparison Test". Creative Computing. pp. 259–260.
{{cite magazine}}: Invalid|ref=harv(help) - Ahl, David (November 1983). "Benchmark Comparison Test". Creative Computing. p. 7.
{{cite magazine}}: Invalid|ref=harv(help) - Wilkinson, Bill (February 1985). "INSIGHT: Atari". Compute!. pp. 139–142.
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