IBM 5100 tinkering

From: hansp <hansp_at_citem.org>
Date: Thu Jul 31 20:37:36 2003

Hans Franke wrote:
>>We did some tinkering with our IBM 5100 the other day with results which
>>might be of interest.
>
>
>> 10 a = 0
>> 20 print a, a*a, sqr(a)
>> 30 a = a + 1
>> 40 if a < 100 goto 20
>> 50 stop
>
>
>>The 5100 seems about 30% faster on though with the following program:
>
>
>> 10 a = 0
>> 20 b = a*a
>> 25 c = sqr(a)
>> 30 a = a + 1
>> 40 if a < 100 goto 20
>> 50 stop
>
>
>>So it seems it is the display which slows it down.
>
>
> Well, to some extend. To my experiance it's rather the PET who
> slowed down the programm. The PET had realy one of the slowest
> BASIC interpreters / Systems around at that time. An Apple II
> did usualy outperform it by some 30-50% with exactly the same
> coding.

Interesting. We are told that the PET BASIC is in fact a version of
microsoft BASIC which was an outright sale with no royalties. Can anyone
confirm/deny that?

We have a number of working BASIC machines of that era and plan on doing
a grand performance comparison one of these days.

  -- hbp
Received on Thu Jul 31 2003 - 20:37:36 BST