The generally accepted reference points for personal computers are now:
1.
The screen resolution -the smallest discernible item on the
display.
This is a combination offactors, including
the
number
of different colours available to
the
programmer,
the
number
of distinctly different
areas
that
can be resolved on
the
display (i.e.
the
pixels),
and
the
number
of
text
characters
that
can be displayed on a
single screen area.
You will find
that
your 6128 compares very favourably
with
any similarly priced
machine
in
each of these respects.
2.
The
BASIC
interpreter
Virtually
every home computer includes with
it
a BASIC
interpreter
that
allows
the
user
to
start
creating
programs to use
the
hardware features. The built
in
programming
language
(BASIC)
that
comes supplied with your machine is itself a
program -
an
immensely complicated
and
intricate program
that
has
been evolved
over a million
man-years
of experience since BASIC was 'invented'
in
the
USA. The
'Beginners' All-purpose
Symbolic Instruction Code' is easily
the
most widely used
computer
language
in
the
world,
and
like any language,
it
comes
in
a variety oflocal
'dialects'.
The version
in
the
6128 is one of
the
most widely compatible dialects ufBASIC, arid
will also
run
programs
written
for operation
under
the
CP IM disc operating system.
It
is a very fast implementation of BASIC -
in
other words
it
performs
its
calculations
quickly -
and
whilst you may not be too concerned
that
one computer may
take
0.05 of
a second to multiply 3 by 5
and
display
the
answer, whereas another may
take
0.075
second to
do
the
same
- where a program
that
draws graphics
patterns
on
the
screen
may
call for
many
thousands of simple repetitive calculations,
the
difference between
0.05
and
0.075 of a second adds
up
to a considerable difference
in
performance.
You will frequently
hear
the
term
'machine code' being used. Machine code is
the
raw
form
ofinstruction
code
that
can be passed to
the
processor.
It
takes
less time to work
out
what
it's
been
asked to,
and
gets on
with
producing
the
result
some 5 to
15
times
faster
than
an
equivalent operation being passed along through
the
BASIC
interpreter.
On
the
other
hand,
it
can
take
5 to 50 times longer to write
an
equivalent
program
in
machine
code
when
compared to performing
the
same overall
task
using
BASIC.
Chapter 9 Page 2
At
your leisure
....
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