Comment by nsxwolf
5 years ago
I'm surprised the Apple 2e's is so high, given the seemingly simplistic nature of the machine. I'm also surprised the TI-99/4A's isn't higher, given how complex it is - with its BASIC interpreter implemented on top of a virtual machine.
Probably just the nature of the sort of chips you could buy at the time and their scan rates and debounce circuitry. As time marches on we have added a lot of abstraction into the mix. One thing I used to do to make old DOS computers 'feel faster' was to turn up the keyboard rates in the BIOS.
TI's throughput certainly was slower. It's been a few decades, but I'm pretty sure it was possible to type faster than the interpreter could keep up. (As a point of reference, listing a program was unbearably slow on the TI, and unreadably fast on the //e.)
I suspect it's just that input processing is so cheap on those early architectures, that latency is really dominated by hardware constraints and not by CPU (however slow it might be). Certainly, on the //e, I'm pretty sure the input routine did little more than copy the character to the input buffer and the screen buffer and advance the cursor. The TI's probably was not much more complicated, despite being implemented in bytecode.
In hindsight, it validates the extremely expensive purchase my father made 35 years ago ;) I loved that computer!