 On two widely used benchmarks of the era, "Byte" magazine's Sieve of Eratosthenes and the Creative Computing benchmark test written by David H. Ahl, the Atari finished near the end of the list in terms of performance, and was much slower than the contemporary Apple II or Commodore PET, in spite of having the same CPU but running it at roughly twice the speed of either.It finished behind relatively slow machines like the Sinclair ZX81 and even some programmable calculators.Most of the language's slowness stemmed from three problems.