The Rugg/Feldman benchmarks are a series of seven short BASIC programming language programs that are used to test the performance of BASIC implementations on various microcomputers. They were published by Tom Rugg and Phil Feldman in the June 1977 issue of the US computer magazine, Kilobaud. The article reported that Integer BASIC, an interpreter program written by Steve Wozniak for the Apple II computer, was much faster than the other programs tested. This sparked widespread comments about the tests, including a lengthy letter from Bill Gates. A follow-up article in the October 1977 issue addressed these concerns in depth and added many new machines and BASICs to the set of results. John Coll added an eighth test using transcendental functions in an article in the February 1978 issue of the British magazine Personal Computer World (PCW). This expanded set became known as the PCW Benchmarks, and was particularly popular as a test for UK-designed machines like the Grundy NewBrain and BBC Micro. The benchmark was widely used through the late 1970s, and appears as a standard in many computer magazines and journals. In the 1980s it was not as widely used in the US as the Creative Computing Benchmark or Byte Sieve, but remained in common use in the UK.
History
First tests The benchmark suite was introduced to test claims that were being made by vendors that their BASIC was much faster than others running on the same machines. The authors were unable to find a set of standardized benchmarks and decided to write their own. The tests deliberately ignored string and floating point performance, as many BASICs of the era, especially those descended from Tiny BASIC, lacked these features. Strings were further hindered by major differences in syntax between different versions. The two ran the benchmarks on every machine they could find, typically at friends' houses. All of the major 8-bit CPUs were tested, including the Intel 8080, Zilog Z80, Motorola 6800 and MOS 6502. For comparison, they also ran it on a CDC Cyber 174 supercomputer, which is so fast that they had to add code to time the run using the system's clock as they could not operate a stopwatch quickly enough. They used this machine for two reasons; one was simply to see how fast such a machine ran, and the other was to ensure no one micro would end up at the top of the list and then claim they had been proven to be the fastest. The article makes a special note of the BASIC that shipped with IMSAI computers, as it basically didn't work. The machine was very new at the time and the BASIC was described by the company as "preliminary". During this period, different IMSAI machines were delivered with different versions of BASIC. Each version had different features, but none of them were able to run even the majority of the programs. The Apple II, using the original Integer BASIC, finished well in front of all the other machines. As the tests did not make use of any floating point features, this result was not surprising given the much simpler internal representation of numbers. The next fastest, albeit significantly slower, was Zapple BASIC on a Zilog Z80 add-in card in an Altair 8800. The rest of the list contained a number of very closely spaced entries, dominated by what would later be known as Microsoft BASIC. Across the entire suite of 8080 and Z80 machines and versions of BASICs, the spread was only 20%. In contrast, the 6800-based machines were isolated entirely at the bottom of the list, 30 to 40% slower than the 8080 and Z80 entries. As the article went to press, the editors of Kilobaud visited several local computer stores to test the programs on newer machines. This process added the production version of IMSAI BASIC, North Star BASIC and the 11 kB BASIC on the Poly-88. IMSAI's results were at the bottom of the pack, while North Star and Poly were in the middle.
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