Some links inside the article. Byte magazine was plenty of ads, and articles can continue after jumping 300 pages<p>Start: <a href="https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-08/page/n137/mode/2up" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-08/page/n137/...</a><p>Continuation: <a href="https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-08/page/n405/mode/2up" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-08/page/n405/...</a><p>Results: <a href="https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-08/page/n411/mode/2up" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-08/page/n411/...</a>
The Byte Benchmark suite can still be downloaded, compiled and run today. It's in pkgsrc, FreeBSD's ports, and can be trivially compiled on common GNU/Linux distros.
The most popular modern descendant of this benchmark suite is here: <a href="https://github.com/kdlucas/byte-unixbench" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kdlucas/byte-unixbench</a>
They write it's "interesting to note" the the IBM PC XT 8088 performed better than the PDP-11/23. I suppose the PDP was a much more expensive machine.
In the Docker container on my laptop, the multi.sh 1 2 3 4 5 6 takes 0.031 seconds.<p><a href="https://github.com/Katzmann1983/performance_test_shell/blob/master/tst.sh" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Katzmann1983/performance_test_shell/blob/...</a>
The Byte benchmarks are still very useful today. They’re also old enough that it’s doubtful that compiler makers are going to accelerate them (we know Intel does this), because barely anybody uses them any more.
Laying out code in variable width font like a boss :). I love reading these BYTE scans from archive.org, they are from such a different computing world. Yet UNIX is the same.
Heh - I worked on 2 of those systems .... remember these are systems with ~1/2Mb of ram and 1-2 mips of CPU. Most are swapping systems, no paging.
In the 6a. shell benchmark, what's the modern equivalent of the "+" option in sort from the below line?<p><pre><code> od sort.$$ | sort -n + 1 > od.$$</code></pre>