About the founder

Since i was young i was intrigued by remote control, robots, transmitters and in short all electronics. I created countless electronic devices. I designed a lot of PCB's by hand(using ink) and when ATARI came with the ST1040 and an affordable PCB design tool, I bought my first real computer.

It turned out that the printers at that time(matrix printers) were not able to produce a good print. And the design of the PCB was still time consuming. But i found that a nice BASIC interpreter which was similar to GW-BASIC was included in the OS(TOS). For some reason i liked this language which was easy to master. And very intuitive.

 

When I found out that Atmel made the 89c2051 which was a 20 pin chip with flash memory, i was excited that there was a small micro processor that could be erased/reprogrammed without the need of UV-erasing of the EPROM. Before the Atmel chip i used the 8052AH, a BASIC interpreter. It worked nice but code ran too slow. And the EPROM's had to be erased by UV light which took a long time.

At those days, electronic circuits consisted of numerous CMOS and TTL chips. And i saw the 89C2051 as an ideal replacement for a lot of CMOS/TTL chips. It would make PCB design much simpler.

And the idea to be able to change the behaviour of an electronic circuit just by reprogramming it, without using a solder iron, intrigued me. Today it is common practice to update firmware to fix bugs or add features but in 1993 it was not so common. At least not to my knowledge.

 

I wrote a complete DOS tool and when i was satisfied Windows became reasonable stable and a standard(windows 3.1).

And thus i rewrote the tool. The tool was for my own usage. When i learned it would be usable to others as well i decided to add Help files, and to sell it for a small fee.

 

In 1995 MCS started to sell BASCOM-LT, a BASIC compiler for Windows 3.1. It was the first Windows application that offered a complete and affordable solution : editor, compiler, simulator and programmer. BASCOM-LT was a 8051 BASIC compiler. The reason why it became popular was that it included a lot of functionality that was easy to use from BASIC. To use an LCD display was simple, just a configuration line to define the used pins, and voila : a working application in minutes. And when you needed a different LCD display, you could simply change the CONFIG line.

And when a different processor was needed, you only had to change the definition file !

Another reason for the success is that we hidden all complexity for the user. No ASM to deal with, simple statements, and of course free updates and support.

Small companies that used the BASIC Stamp also recognized another advantage : there was no need for expensive modules and the code ran much quicker.

 

When windows 95 became more an industry standard, users also wanted a 32 bit version. So BASCOM-LT was rewritten for a big part and support for arrays and floating point (single) was added.

The many different 8051 variants make it impossible to support all chips but the DAT files were easy to add by the user.

 

When Atmel launched the AVR chip, the 8051 compiler was rewritten once again to support the powerful AVR chips. The result was BASCOM-AVR.

The AVR chip has a lot of internal memory, and it has simple linear memory. The best part is that you can program the chip inside the circuit. No wonder this chip family became so popular.

And because the chip is so powerful, we could extend the compiler as well. We could add features which are almost impossible to add for the 8051.

 

With more and more users, there was no way i could manage everything in my spare time. So in order to guarantee the future of BASCOM, i decided to work full time for MCS.

Today MCS is still a small company with only 3 employees.

We believe in free updates and support. With the number of (demo) users, it is however not possible to support everybody. You need to realize that reading and answering emails is time consuming.

Not to mention to duplicate used hardware. We are unique that we even support hardware!

 

Since a long time we are working on a more professional version of the software.

Some times we put a feature of it to the current BASCOM version.

An ARM version is under development too.

Note that we do not give details or time frames for these versions, nor do we do for other features.

In order to migrate to a future version it is however important that you keep your software up to date. This will make a migration more simple.

 

 

Things we find important :

 

 

Have fun !

 
Mark Alberts

MCS Electronics