Jim Gilbreath of the Naval Ocean System Center had been considering the concept of writing a small language benchmarking program for some time, desiring one that would be portable across languages, small enough that the program code would fit on a single printed page, and did not rely on specific features like hardware multiplication or division.
[1][2] Gilbreath felt the sieve would be an ideal benchmark as it avoided indirect tests on arithmetic performance, which varied widely between systems.
[1] After six months of effort porting it to as many platforms as he had access to, the first results were introduced in the September 1981 edition of Byte in an article entitled "A High-Level Language Benchmark".
[1]The article provided reference implementations in ten languages, including more popular selections like BASIC, C, Pascal, COBOL, and FORTRAN, and some less well-known examples like Forth, ZSPL, Ratfor, PL/1 and PLMX.
Running on the dedicated Ithaca InterSystems Pascal-100 machine, a Pascal MicroEngine based computer, it ran in 54 seconds, while on the Z80 it was 239, and 516 on the Apple II.
Thanks to readers providing additional samples, the number of machines, operating systems and languages compared in the resulting tables was greatly expanded.
[9] A wider variety of minicomputers and mainframes was also included, with times that the 68k generally beat except for the very fastest machines like the IBM 3033 and high-end models of the VAX.
In spite of his original warning not to do so, it soon began appearing in magazine advertisements as a way to compare performance against the competition,[10][11] and as a general benchmark.
[20][a] The dialect is not specified, but a number of details mean it does not run under early versions of Microsoft BASIC (4.x and earlier), among these the use of long variable names like SIZE and FLAGS.