19 Mar
2012
19 Mar
'12
6:59 a.m.
Hi Eric
I'm not knocking the processor. I used to write
embedded code for 6502s and Z80s, years ago.
You are correct that the compact code of the 6502
was often a winner.
It is just that the BASIC running on the Apple IIe
was really bad. Even the simple code to run the check
sum ( less than 10 lines of code ) was enough to
put one to sleep.
The good part was that I could ^S the screen and
stop when I wanted to compare a smaller block of
bytes. On the laptop, I'd have had to put periodic
delays. It was easier to just set the terminal value
and run the entire code.
I could be wrong but it seems that the BASIC code
on my Poly88 was faster ( after a 20 minute cassette
load ).
I know that some BASIC code was slowed by the search
used to do things like GOTO and GOSUB. I recall writng
BASIC code on a powersupply tester and putting
all the subroutines at the begining of the code to
speed things up.
I just find the thought of writing a business application
with this slow a BASIC would have been tough. I'd
have made 90% of the code in assembler.
Apple's inefficient use of page0 is another thing. There
are many variables that might be used, maybe,
once in 100000 code executions. Some were only
used once to initialize hardware. Things like baud rates
and such had no place on page0.
One could tell that the 6502 was a great embedded
processor. I enjoyed using it.
Dwight
From: eric at brouhaha.com
dwight elvey wrote:
The one thing I found is that the BASIC on the
Apple is really
slow. It is about the slowest I've ever used. How people put
up with it I don't know.
We put up with it back in the late 1970s because none
of the common,
inexpensive microcomputers available at the time were any faster. And
although the Atari 800 had better graphics, it had far worse I/O.
Even the 4 MHz Z80 systems and 5 MHz 8088 systems weren't much faster,
because the 6502 is more cycle-efficient than either. It really wasn't
until the 286 era that it became commonplace for microcomputers to be
significantly faster than the Apple II. Of course, by then there were
also faster Apple II models, but that was about the end of the line for
general-purpose microcomputers using the 6502, while the x86 was still
being aggressively developed.