Description:

The BYTE Unix benchmarks that we published in March, 1990, we
expected that they fill our needs for several years. It was only a
few months before we started to see that UNIX workstation performance
was going to make the benchmark design questionable. The design flaw
was that the benchmarks timed a fixed number of loops; if there were
to few loops, the times were too small to be reliable. Perhaps we
could have increased the number of loops and been safe for another
few years (months?). But with IBM's introduction of the RS/6000, it
became obvious that we needed to redesign our benchmarks.