As the early 8-Bit computers became more popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s, several computer benchmarks were released to compare the performance of the BASIC programming language on these machines.
There were three common BASIC benchmarks in this era. The earliest, released in June 1977 were the Rugg/Feldman benchmarks which gained popularity in the UK. The Byte Sieve released in September 1981 and the Creative Computing Benchmark first introduced in November 1983 were both more popular in the United States.
I am collecting these benchmarks here for easy reference and to benchmark the various 8-Bit machines I build and own. Each benchmark is copyright their original author. Anything else produced by me is under the MIT License.
To see some original numbers see Creative Computing March 1984. In the accuracy measure, smaller numbers are better. 0.000001 is excellent, 0.187805 is poor. Smaller is also better for randomness with numbers under 15 good and over 15 fair.
The following are the results for the machines that I built or own.
| Computer | Time | Accuracy | Random |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agon Lite 2 BBC Basic 24-bit | 0:01 | .000257968903 | 0.2 |
| Agon Lite 2 BBC Basic | 0:01 | .000257968903 | 6.0 |
| Z80-MBC2 MS Basic ROM | 0:28 | .0338745 | 7.5 |
| Z80-MBC2 MS Basic CP/M | 0:30 | .187805 | 7.5 |
| RC2014 Classic MBasic ROM | 0:30 | .0338745 | 7.5 |
| RC2014 Pro MBasic CP/M | 0:34 | .187805 | 7.5 |
| V20-MBC MS Basic CP/M | 0:36 | .187805 | 7.5 |
| Neo 6502 Apple II | 1:53 | .0010414235 | 12.0 |
| Ben Eater 65C02 1 Mhz | 1:56 | .00104141235 | 11.2 |
I have copied a few entries from the original article into the table below for comparison.
| Computer | Time | Accuracy | Random |
|---|---|---|---|
| IBM PC (Compiled Basic) | 0:06 | .01159668 | 20.4 |
| IBM PC | 0:24 | .01159668 | 6.3 |
| TRS-80 Model II | 1:11 | .187805 | 3.1 |
| Atari 800 (MBasic) | 1:35 | .150879 | 2.1 |
| Apple III | 1:48 | .011914 | 6.7 |
| Vic-20 | 1:49 | .0010414235 | 23.7 |
| Commodore SuperPET | 1:50 | .000209331512 | 20.4 |
| Commodore 64 | 1:53 | .0010414235 | 8.9 |
| Apple II plus | 1:53 | .0010414235 | 12.0 |
| Apple IIe | 1:53 | .0010414235 | 12.0 |
| TRS-80 Model III | 1:59 | .0338745 | 5.8 |
| TRS-80 Model I | 2:19 | .0338745 | 12.0 |
| TI-994A | 3:46 | .00000011 | 2.6 |
| Sinclair ZX81 | 4:23 | .0006685257 | 6.3 |
| Sinclair Spectrum | 4:39 | .0006685257 | 3.5 |