Creative Micro Designs

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Creative Micro Designs (CMD), since 2001 CMD Technology Group , is one in East Longmeadow , Massachusetts , Headquartered US computer company, founded in 1987 by Doug Cotton and Mark Fellows and self-developed hardware and software for the Commodore - home computer C 64 and C 128 offered.

history

The first product was the JiffyDOS floppy operating system , developed by Mark Fellows in 1985 and later updated several times , which, while maintaining a high degree of compatibility , offered a very large speed advantage in read / write access compared to the original DOS of the Commodore floppy drives . In the following years, in a market environment from which other hardware manufacturers slowly withdrew for the C64 / 128, the company made a name for itself with hardware peripherals that were considered innovative for these computers at the time. These include u. a. to mention: 1990 the HD-Series , which enabled access to commercially available SCSI hard drives, 1992 the FD-Series , 3½ "floppy disk drives, which, in contrast to the VC1581 previously offered by Commodore, also have the expanded capacities of HD and ED floppy disks The RAMLink RAM drive , which offered up to 16 MB of memory, and the SuperCPU 20 MHz accelerator card from 1996. The end of the American edition of RUN magazine and COMPUTE! 's Gazette prompted the company to move from From 1994 to 1999 to publish its own computer magazine with the Commodore World , this was the last printed periodical in North America dealing with the Commodore 8-bit computers.

CMD stopped selling Commodore products in 2001 and has been offering general IT services since then under the name CMD Technology Group . The original developers Mark Fellows and Doug Cotton withdrew from the company in the following years, the sole rights holder of the Commodore products became Fellows. The production and marketing of this product line were exclusively licensed on July 21, 2001 to the programmer Maurice Randall, whose company Click Here Software, Co. ( Charlotte , Michigan ) advertised it through its website until November 2009, but was part of the C64 scene for discussion forums it can be seen that apparently no more sales of the products took place since 2006 at the latest. In November 2009, Randall announced that he would officially discontinue support and sales. The JiffyDOS series was then licensed to Jim Brain, who has been offering them since January 2010 through his Retro Innovations webshop .

Important products from CMD

  • JiffyDOS - serial fast charging system and extension of Commodore DOS Wedge 5.1
  • FD Series - The FD2000 used high density floppy disks of up to 1.6MB of space, while the FD4000 with extra high density floppy disks used up to 3.2MB of space
  • HD Series - SCSI hard drives between 20 MB and 4.4 GB with CMD's native partitioning system of 16 MB per partition
  • RAMLink - A fast solid state RAM disk that plugs into the expansion port of the C64 or C128, providing up to 16MB of additional memory. The RAMLink made it possible to work with the Commodore 17xx RAM expansion units
  • Swiftlink / Turbo232 - A dial-up modem for the Commodore 64 or 128 of up to 38.4kbit / s (SwiftLink) or 56.6kbit / s (Turbo232)
  • 1750 XL - A Commodore 17xx REU clone in two variants, 512 KB or 2 MB
  • SmartTRACK / SmartMOUSE - An intelligent Commodore 1351 3-button mouse or trackball with 2 KB RAM and a battery-operated Y2K compatible real time clock , mouse was also compatible with GEOS
  • SuperCPU - A 65816 CPU 8/16-bit upgrade for the C64 and C128, with this card, which is connected to the expansion port of the respective computer, you can accelerate the device to 20 MHz, was published on May 4th 1997, with version 2, the C128 compatible version launched in 1998
  • SuperRAMCard - Works in conjunction with the SuperCPU between 1 and 16 MB of directly accessible memory with the 65816 processor

Products

Remarks

  1. Creative Micro Designs - A Brief History ( Memento from May 15, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  2. Click Here Software, Co. ( Memento of November 24, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  3. FD-2000 - the best 3.5 "solution for your C64 ( Memento from August 7, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  4. The CMD HD - the hard drive for your C64 ( Memento from September 12, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  5. SwiftLink-232 Serial Cartridge , English
  6. C64 CPU Speed ​​up Cartridges - The History , English
  7. An extended tutorial on how to program CMD's brilliant 20 MHz accelerator card for Commodore 64/128 , English
  8. Description of the SuperRAM card , c64-wiki.de

Web links