Of course this doesn't alter the point about being as fast as the BASIC that early PCs came with, the only thing most end users had to write their own programs on them until things such as Turbo Pascal appeared (November 1983).
If you want an computer that you can wrap around a pencil, I bet it could be done simply using a very small conventional silicon chip embedded in a flexible medium. Perhaps some of this technology could help with interconnections.
Interpreted BASIC was the only thing most end users had on those computers, for quite a few years, until Turbo Pascal and Think Pascal/C changed everything.
Professional software was written in assembly language but at the start of the revolution most of the programs that people wrote themselves, or that you saw printed in magazines to type in yourself, were in BASIC.
It was fast enough for many tasks.
It makes no sense to compare the execution speed of the output of a modern C++ or Rust compiler on one architecture to a BASIC interpreter on another.
SeRV at 60 kHz is going to do between 1000 and 2000 instructions per second, depending on the instruction mix.
As something to compare that against, an Apple ][ running AppleSoft BASIC runs `FOR I=0 TO N:T=T+I:NEXT I` at 250 loops per second.
On SeRV that loop is going to be something like ...
... which will take 96 clock cycles per iteration, or about 600 loops per second at 60 kHz, so that's 2.4x faster than AppleSoft on an Apple ][. Which many people found fast enough to start a revolution.Yes, AppleSoft is using floating point numbers, which are slower than integers, but Integer BASIC only runs that same code at about 330 loops per second.
Original IBM Model 5050 PC runs the same loop at 415 loops per second in BASIC (380 for BASICA), if that's your reference ecosystem. Not a big difference. Still slower than SeRV at 60 KHz.