Benchmark Modula-2/Armadillo Computing Archives

This page was started after getting in touch with Jim Olinger of former Armadillo Computing, and Tom Breeden of amongst other software, the Aglet Compiler. Benchmark Modula-2 with friends was created in the mid-80’s, by Leon Frenkel and published, by Avant-Garde Software. Modula-2 was all the rage at the time, and many saw it as the replacement for C. Quite a few projects for the Amiga used Benchmark M2, and after a while the rights to it, with libs and tools were bought by Armadillo Computing, i.e. Jim Olinger. Jim was working on a helper system, the Benchmark Assistant, and intended to (and did) continue work on the Benchmark M2. Tom Breeden soon got involved, and they released some updates and bugfixes. For a while the Benchmark M2 environmen was for sale again. After the market had gone out of the Amiga platform, interested dwindled and Jim, heading on to other ventures, gave the remaining items to Tom. For more backstory, also see the blog post.

This page presents a few, but not all of the items in the archives. Please see the git archives themselves for content. Feel free to submit Pull Requests if you want to make something better or make it build.

Check out the git-repo/release

Check out the git-repo/disk-images

This preservation was only made possible by Jim Olinger and Tom Breeden. Thanks to them, another piece of computing history is preserved. Jim arranged for documentation to be scanned and Tom sent physical disks for preservation, and also uploaded source code to the repo.

Like a lot of programmers, I first learned about Modula-2 from the August 1984 Byte cover story. I’d done a lot of programming in Pascal and Modula-2 was the logical successor. I started with another Modula-2, probably Stony Brook. That was so buggy I gave up on it after a few weeks. Later, I bought Avant-Garde Modula-2 and the add-on libraries. I found out that compiling the definition modules in the proper order for complicated programs was maddeningly difficult. After working out the relationships manually a few times, I wrote a program to handle it. When I offered the program, named "Benchmark Assistant," to Leon Frenkel, I was rather surprised when he offered to sell me the company. It turned out that almost everybody who was interested in Modula-2 had already bought it. I sold a lot of upgrades, but not nearly enough to make my investment back. Tom Breeden contacted me with some suggestions for improvements to Benchmark. He’d written his own version, called Aglet. He volunteered to upgrade the compiler and I was glad to take him up on it.

I’ve also got lots of other sources and executables that might be of interest eg, for Leon’s add-on modules and the Debugger. I’m trying to refresh my memory of the M68K days. Apparently when AmigaOS 2.04 came out I released my modules (as Aglet) for Benchmark use of the OS API calls before Jim purchased the Benchmark software system from Leon.

Later, when AmigaOS 3.0 was released, did the same under the label of Armadillo Computing with Jim O.

Armadillo also released an upgraded compiler/linker/editor as Benchmark v1.10, with a number of bug fixes and improvements Jim and mostly I made to v1.04. This should be still compatible with any earlier software that used the earlier version.. I continued working on a v2.0 of the compiler, to be much improved, but still compatible. And then a 32 bit version (the Benchmark compilers had been 16 bit INTEGER/CARDINAL) which would not be compatible.