Okay so 8051 microcontrollers are a different architecture and so fundamentally a different micro altogether? Requiring a different programmer device?
I'm going to try and use a ATtiny instead then - this seems a bit more beginner-friendly. I've found some AVR information and some C code for frequency counters and for pushing text to a LCD screen so I'll try to combine the two programs.
Out of interest, as far as I can tell Atmel don't supply a programmer for the 8051 architecture - why not?