Thanks to Runer112 and calc84maniac, my new Output( routine displays characters at speeds TI can't even begin to compete with.  Yet even with their horrible Output( code, they beat me by two seconds.

My guess is that if I return nz with the result of my computation in OP1, there's a HUGE amount of code the calculator goes through before continuing to parse the Ti-Basic program.  

Is there any routine or code or something to speed up the process, that is, by avoiding Ti's "parser-is-done-go-to-next-line" code?  Unfortunately, reset numOP1,(iy+ParsFlag2) is not an option for me.