Looks to me like this was a just a sit and code in some set number of hours with whatever development environment happened to be available for the machine in question.

I sure I read a comment by the organisers - somewhere - to the effect that they had arranged things to even the field somewhat. For example, having the iphone be voice-controlled slows it down enormously.

I attended the event on the day (TNMoC member) - it was intended as a fun event and small fund raiser and to celebrate 10 years of TNMoC, as well as to look at how computing has progressed over the decades.

Although no real rules, I gather that part of the aim was to try to create a level playing field and BASIC was used on the PDP-8, Apple II and Beeb. Also the default output device speed of the day was used - so a 110 baud ASR33 on the PDP-8 (which was the limiting factor there) and normal text output on the Apple and Beeb. The Win98 system was also written in BASIC - although VBA inside a spreadsheet, however, ...

Sure, we can all make them faster - I coded a PDP-8 version in assembler and it was much faster - at 9600 baud - the limitation then is arithmetic precision (I had to go to 60-bit integers before the 15 second limit ended). The Apple and Beeb versions used at the event were more or less the same programs - they used strings for extended precision numbers - it may well have been faster using numeric arrays but it didn't really matter. (The PDP-8 version used the default floating point numbers in it's BASIC as the 110 baud speed was really what slowed that up) The microBit code was Python. The amusing part was the chap trying to use Siri on his iPhone...

I find the WITCH quite awesome to watch and hear. A machine who's speed is measured in seconds per cycle...

TNMoC is well worth a visit if you can make it.

-Gordon
Ps. Hello. 6502 user/hacker since '78 when I was sat in-front of an Apple II

Welcome aboard! Nice to hear from someone at the event in question.

Thanks for your notes, Drogon, and welcome! Absolutely agree that TNMoC is worth a visit - indeed, two or three to do it justice. It's on the Bletchley Park estate, but with a separate and much much lower entrance free than the BP museum. You could try to see both in one visit but you wouldn't be able to do them both justice.