All about the famous benchmark, the history of it and before it, and tabulated results too:
Whetstone Benchmark History and Results
In 1971 Roy Wickens, one of the founding members of TSU, abandoned producing a portable benchmark using real programs as it was becoming too expensive. He asked Harold Curnow to produce modular synthetic benchmark suites. Harold produced the COPRXX suite for COBOL and a scientific program based on Brian Wichmann’s work. The first Whetstone benchmark, known as HJC11 (later ALPR12), was written in Algol 60 and completed in November 1972. The Fortran codes (HJC12 and HJC12D) were published in April 1973 as FOPR12 and FOPR13. The first results published were for IBM and ICL mainframes in 1973.
Link within to the original paper “A synthetic benchmark”. (I don’t think I knew that it was a British effort)
(via a reference to the BBC Micro’s 0.0031 MWIPS rating)