ABC 800

The Luxor ABC 800 series were office-versions of the ABC 80 home computer. They featured an enhanced BASIC interpreter, a slighly faster clocked CPU and more memory: 32 KB RAM was now standard, the Z80 was clocked at 3.58 MHz (using an NTSC color subcarrier crystal) and they could also be extended with "high" resolution graphics (240x240 pixels).

The ABC 800 came in a monochrome version with an 80 character wide screen, and a color version with 40 characters. The later ABC 806 had more memory and improved graphics, and the ABC 802 was compact version with the main board integrated with the small screen (where the ABC 80 and 800 has the main board integrated with the keyboard and a separate screen). It had no high-resolution graphics.

Storage was usually two 5.25" floppy disk units in 160, 320 or 640 KB capacity. External hard disk systems became available later (primarily the ABC 850, 10 MB). Model numbers 'ABC 800 M' for monochrome and 'ABC 800 C' for color.

"Who needs IBM-compatibility?", asked Luxor's adverts. However, most computer buyers eventually considered it a requirement. A certain compatibility could be achieved between the ABC-world and the PC-world with the help of a program called 'W ABC'.

The ABC 800 computer was also sold by Facit by the name Facit DTC.

Performance

In order to see how the ABC 800 would compare to other contemporary personal computers, in 1982, the Swedish magazine "Mikrodatorn" performed a "benchmark" test using eight short BASIC programs (referred to as BM1~BM8) defined by the American Kilobaud Magazine and routinely used by the British magazine Personal Computer World for testing new machines.

The result was that ABC 800's semi-compiling BASIC interpreter turned out to be faster than most other BASICs used in popular machines, especially when integer variables are used, the results for some well known computers were as follows (times in seconds):

BM1 BM2 BM3 BM4 BM5 BM6 BM7 BM8 ABC 800 integer "not measured - see ABC 80 for approximate numbers" ABC 800 single precision 0.9 1.8 6.0 5.9 6.3 11.6 19.6 2.9 ABC 800 double precision 1.2 2.2 10.0 10.6 11.0 17.8 26.4 14.4 IBM PC 1.5 5.2 12.1 12.6 13.6 23.5 37.4 3.5 Apple III 1.7 7.2 13.5 14.5 16.0 27.0 42.5 7.5 VIC-20 1.4 8.3 15.5 17.1 18.3 27.2 42.7 9.9 ZX81 in "fast mode" 4.5 6.9 16.4 15.8 18.6 49.7 68.5 22.9

As seen from the table, the ABC 800 was approximately twice as fast as the IBM PC on floating point calculations, except for BM8 where it was only 20% faster. Using integer variables (only measured for the older ABC 80 in this test) the numbers would be approximately 2-3 times as low (i.e. speeds 2-3 times as high) as for the single precision results in the table.

External links

* http://www.devili.iki.fi/Computers/Luxor/index.en.html