The MACAOS concept was first envisioned by Helge Nilsen, founder of Elprint, Scandinavia's leading manufacturer of prototype and small series PCBs. Helge was looking for a way to reduce costs and improve throughput, while at the same time increasing production quality.

Manufacturers often spend hours preparing data files before they can be fed into their manufacturing processes. In particular, the myriad of variations of data file formats generated by the wide variety of CAD programs in use can easily lead to interpretation errors, missing or ambiguous data, manufacturability issues, and so on. These problems delay production and increase costs. Manufacturers usually charge startup fees or tooling charges to cover these costs.

For prototypes and small series, a substantial portion of the total job price is the startup fee, which comes in addition to the cost of each PCB. If PCB designers had access, to a software application that packaged and clearly specified all of the necessary data then manufacturers could greatly reduce the time required to feed those jobs directly into production. This would, in turn, make it possible to greatly reduce or even eliminate startup fees.

With this background, MACAOS (Multi-Artwork Conversion And Ordering System) was developed. Since its first release in 1999, MACAOS has been downloaded by more than 8000 PCB designers and purchasers in Scandinavia. The initial MACAOS application was used by PCB designers to preview production files, specify board parameters, obtain price quotations and place orders. At that time, the first generation of the applications that would become Macaos PCB Factory were already in use at the Elprint factory.

The success of MACAOS has encouraged us to expand our vision to encompass every step in the value addition chain, from circuit board design, through manufacture, assembly, documentation, etc. to inclusion of the finished circuit in a product or system. Toward that end, our second generation of Macaos PCB Factory was developed in 2005 and Macaos Enterprise was developed to replace and expand on the success of the original MACAOS application.

In 2008, Macaos Software AS was formed when three former Elprint employees acquired the software rights from Elprint. Our years of experience on the factory floor have given us a unique insight into the development of software systems for real world production environments, while independence from the Elprint factory has opened our horizon beyond Scandinavia, leading to the 2009 release of Macaos Convergence (our supply chain management solution) as well as powerful new panelization and solder paste stencil modules in Macaos Enterprise.