Congratulations. It seems you concentrated more on the Motorola (Freescale) MCU rather than PIC, right? The PIC18 C compiler has been dominated by HI-tech PICC18 and Microchip C18 (now both owned by Microchip). The GNU based Microchip C30 took a lot place on relatively new dsPIC30/33, PIC24 too. Now there are some opportunity on the PIC32 (everybody is new to this chip). Do you have any plan to expand your PIC C compiler? Funny N. Au Group Electronics, http://www.AuElectronics.com ________________________________ From: Walter Banks To: piclist@mit.edu Sent: Friday, May 22, 2009 9:09:26 AM Subject: [OT] Byte Craft turns 30 This is off topic. I won't do this again for another 20 years. Thirty years today I walked out of the University of Waterloo as a employee for the last time. These were the exponential moments in the embedded system world. Early enough that embedded systems and personal computers were just starting to follow their own paths. The story is an old one a start up company develops products for a few years and finds that special niche that becomes its signature. Byte Craft started developing micro-processor based consumer, industrial and automotive products. Things were different in those days, the first step in an embedded systems development was to create tools to support the processors used. We created tools and created products. We created more tools and soon the tools were more important to us than the products. Byte Craft became a software tool company. We wrote a lot of assemblers for companies that needed them. Byte Craft developed MISTRAL in the mid 80's for the Motorola 6805 the first high level language that could compete with well written hand coded assembler. MISTRAL evolved into C6805. Proof that high level languages were effective on very small processors, the first practical use of expert system technology for optimization. This product set the standard for tight code generation and innovative solutions found in our compiler products. Byte Craft has developed a lot of compiler innovation. We developed industrial strength code generation, HLL support for homogeneous and now heterogeneous multiprocessor environments. The compiler innovation continues... Less visible has been the work we have done on instruction set design. We have been part of the design team on many of the instructions sets that we support. Most recently working instructions sets that are designed specifically for machine generated code. (eTPU and eTPU2) The Microchip MPC compiler was the fourth C compiler for embedded systems that we wrote. It continues to be a Byte Craft supported product with the recent implementation of support for enhanced midrange instruction set to be formally released later this year. The business world is a full contact sport. It is important to remember to give something back. Byte Craft created a pleasant workplace for our employees. As we evolved into a software tools company we put some our more interesting technology into the public domain using the PIC list and other methods to insure that some ideas would never be owned. The various charge transfer sensor technologies (touch switches and port based A/D converters) and information based barcode technology are examples of this. There are other ways to give back. Byte Craft represents Canada at ISO SC22 on Working Group 14 (C standards). Standards groups are a serious unpaid commitment of time and resources. Here we co-authored IEC/ISO 18037 C standards for embedded systems that has brought the unique requirements for embedded systems processors to the language that is used to describe application solutions to the tools we use. This work continues with C1X the current work in progress. Byte Craft has supplied thousands of copies of our tools to individual students for their final year and masters projects. Some of these projects are showcased on our website. There are a lot of outstanding people working in the embedded systems world. I see creativity every day in my conversations and emails with customers and friends. For me I get up in the morning and look forward to the day. I feel the thrill when project comes comes together and the pride of looking at products knowing there is a little bit of me in there. Walter Banks Byte Craft Limited 1 (519) 888-6911 http://www.bytecraft.com walter@bytecraft.com -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist