the manufacturers, for example Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands and Brasil. Unlike MSX, BASICODE made no effort to standardise the hardware it ran on, rather it offered a standardised subset of the ubiquitous BASIC programming language and a common data format for Compact Cassettes which could be read and written on all computers for which BASICODE was available. As a result of this device independence, unlike MSX, BASICODE was not limited to computers by specific manufacturers. The installed base of BASICODE is hard to estimate, because both the Basicoders and the programs written in BASICODE were generally freely available. They were available for a large number of home computers sold during this era. Though not a commercial product, several vendors offered versions on tape which could be bought cheaply, presumably aimed at those that could not receive BASICODE radio broadcasts. It must be stated that BASICODE was, by design, unable to use the capabilities of the host computers to their full extent. The language standard defined by BASICODE was the lowest common denominator of all relevant computer systems. This concept was partially abandoned only with BASICODE3/3C, as some computers or computer variants like the ZX80/ZX81 and the KC87 were not capable of graphics and color and the new sections of BASICODE using these capabilities were not usable on them. Especially for applications that relied on timing and graphics or sound, for example video games, BASICODE was clearly inferior to programs written in "native" BASIC or machine code. The strengths of BASICODE were in the areas of application design, education software and data sharing. The BASICODE format was also used for Pascal programs. Pascal was a much more consistent language across systems, but compilers were available only for very few types of home computers. The underlying concept of BASICODE, which is the definition of a language standard for platform-independent software development and the implementation of said standard as system-specific runtimes (Bascoder) was later revisited in the programming language Java, via operating system-specific Java Virtual Machines which execute Java programs. Additionally, the distribution of data and information in the BASICODE data format is reminiscent of current platform-agnostic document types like the Portable Document Format (PDF) and the PDF reader applications it necessitates. The BASICODE data format In the BASICODE format, the recording of programs is analogous to the recording of data. So, when recording programs, the commands are not read and written