- Benchmarking Basic on Vintage Computers (techtinkering.com)
There are a few machines I’m quite interested in comparing so I decided to create a simple Basic benchmark to get an idea of their relative speed. The benchmark tests 7 aspects and is inspired by qsbb, which is included with the qlay Sinclair QL emulator. The Basic source code for all the machines tested is available in the GitHub repo. I chose Basic because it was available on all the machines I wanted to test and because the versions I created for each machine would require few changes.
- Atari ST (Wikipedia)
Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the company’s 8-bit computers. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985, and was widely available in July. It was the first personal computer with a bitmapped color graphical user interface, using a version of Digital Research’s GEM environment from February 1985. The Atari 1040ST, released in 1986 with 1 MB of memory, was the first home computer with a cost per kilobyte of RAM under US$1/KB.