MauryMarkowitz2

Actually, this page is a perfect example of why I copied all these programs by hand:

101 BASIC Computer Games != BASIC Computer Games

The former is in various DEC dialects of BASIC which varied greatly even among each other, let alone with other vendors. For instance, BASIC on the EduSystem 50, a PDP-8 setup, was incompatible with BASIC on the EduSystem 30, let alone BASIC-PLUS on the PDP-11.

The latter has all of its games converted to a Microsoft BASIC-like format, which is outlined in the front of the book. But that is not all, a number of the games from 101 are removed (like Can-Am), others are added, and many of them are updated.

So while they are indeed similar, they are also different collections and this page makes the common mistake of failing to notice this.

DEC could have ruled the world

No way.

DEC's entire corporate structure was based on a particular business model that demanded their products sell for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands per sale.

They tried many times to break out of this box, but failed every time. There was simply too much of the company invested in selling into a particular size of customer, and its weight meant that they could not survive, for instance, selling individual small computers to end users.

You can see this right to the end: even when they came out with Alpha it was targeted 100% to what was then the high-end of the new server-based market. Sure they made workstations, but only grudgingly, and with the hope that it would be part of a network containing at least one of their higher-end servers.

I've been slowly documenting these differences with a series of Wiki articles. Generally though, there's three major "families":

* The original Dartmouth BASIC turned into a wide variety of mainframe versions. These are marked by the use of the CHANGE statement and supporting the MAT statements. * HP's dialect had array-based strings (like C) and string slicing... LET A$[1,6]="HELLO. * Timeshare's SUPER BASIC, which turned into BASIC-PLUS, which turned into MS BASIC, lacked those features and instead used MID/LEFT/RIGHT.

There's many other more minor changes from dialect to dialect, but those are the main differences.

The first benchmarks indicated the plain Archimedes had higher FP throughput than a 16MHz 386 with a 387.

After some poking about, it is clear this statement is not true for any definition of "first" or "benchmark" or even considering confusion between 386 and 387.

In FP terms, the A3000 got 76 kWIPS, compared to a 387/40's 5.7 MWIPS. Scaling to earlier 16 MHz parts would suggest ~1.5 MWIPS, still almost 20 times as fast as the ARM. Even a bare 386DX40 gets 316 kWIPS, scaling suggests very similar performance overall.

It's plausible that an ARM2 would outperform a 386*SX*/16, but that's without the 387SX. No other combination of 38x parts would not outperform it.