Creative Micro Designs

Creative Micro Designs, Inc. (CMD) was founded in the fall of 1987 on the strength of JiffyDOS, a new DOS speed enhancement product for the Commodore 64 and 128. Company President and co-founder Mark Fellows developed JiffyDOS during 1985 and 1986, and began marketing JiffyDOS nationally through his own company, Fellows, Inc., in the fall of 1986 via classified ads in 'Computer Shopper' and 'Keyboard' magazines. Mr. Fellows continued marketing JiffyDOS alone until fall of 1987, when he was joined by Charles A. Christianson, a relative and recent college graduate majoring in business and marketing. 

Mr. Christianson began helping out part-time with the marketing, sales, and business aspects, and helped to formally incorporate CMD at the end of 1987. Sales of JiffyDOS continued to rise steadily, and a partnership was soon formed with Charles R. Christianson, father of Charles A., who operated an export business of his own at that time. The senior Mr. Christianson brought years of business experience to the company and helped to transform it from a basement operation into a full business. 

In April of 1988, Creative Micro Designs, Inc. became a full-time business, and tripled its annual sales in dollars each year in the first three years of operation. The company made its first jaunt to the annual World of Commodore show in Philadelphia in November of 1988. Work continued on improving JiffyDOS, and CMD rolled out the present version 6 of the product in mid-1989. 

Amidst the rise in popularity of JiffyDOS, CMD began work on a SCSI-based hard drive system that featured a highly-compatible DOS coupled with partitioning options that helped it to emulate other Commodore disk drives. CMD began development of this product in 1989. Special attention was paid to assuring compatibility with important software products such as GEOS, CP/M, and Superbase. The level of compatibility of this new series of hard drives, along with its expandability and versatility, made it an instant hit when the product began shipping in 1990. 

With the development of the CMD HD Series hard drive and DOS completed, CMD turned its hardware development capabilities toward developing a RAM-based disk device. This effort resulted in RAMLink, an expandable RAM drive with a capacity of up to 16 Megabytes. RAMLink was also capable of maintaining its contents indefinitely through its own power source, or for several hours of actual power loss through the use of a battery backup system. Many other features were employed into RAMLink, such as a parallel interface to the normally serially-operated CMD HD Series hard drive, a slot for using memory from other third party RAM expanders, and a pass-through port for other types of utility and I/O cartridges. The HD Series hard drive DOS was ported to this new device, along with some changes and improvements, and again compatibility with important software was kept very much in mind. 

Initially, RAMLink could not be used directly with GEOS. However, gateWay, a new GEOS 'front-end' provided GEOS compatibility, and was offered with RAMLink units that shipped in 1991. While gateWay provided some capabilities that GEOS itself could not, it also presented some trade-offs and added to the learning curve of using RAMLink. A new GEOS CONFIGURE file replaced gateWay in RAMLink shipments beginning in 1992, while gateWay was further revised as an independent product. 

Two other products joined the CMD family in 1991: SwiftLink and SID Symphony. These products were initially developed and sold by Dr. Evil Labs, a partnership formed by college classmates as an experiment in designing, manufacturing, and marketing products. SID Symphony provided additional sound voices to Commodore computers, and helped lead to the development of hundereds, perhaps thousands of 'stereo' music files. SwiftLink, a high-speed RS-232 interface for the 64 and 128, has grown constantly more popular as faster modems have been developed and dropped in price. 

CMD added several more GEOS-related software products to its product line in 1992. The first of these was geoMakeBoot, a utility program that operates in the GEOS environment to create GEOS boot disks on any device currently supported by the GEOS Configure system in use. This made it easy to create boot partitions on CMD HD Series hard drives and RAMLink. 

The next product added to the CMD line was also a GEOS-related product, originally marketed in Germany as "GEOS LQ." To avoid any possible problems with trademark infringement, CMD released the English language version of this program under the name "Perfect Print LQ" This product was well-received by the market, as it helped to patch over one of the weaker points of GEOS itself -- printer output quality. It could easily be said that this product is the GEOS equivalent of the much heralded Adobe Type Manager for the Apple Macintosh. Perfect Print was further refined later in 1992, incorporating better quality output drivers and the ability to use borders within geoWrite documents. 

Two more GEOS-related software products joined the CMD line in 1992. The first was geoCanvas, a new 'paint' program for GEOS in 40 column mode. Sales of geoCanvas weren't up to expectation, however, and CMD's distribution contract was not renewed when it expired. The second release was a collection of various utilities written by one of the best known programmers in the GEOS community, Jim Collette. This latter release was aptly titled, "Collette Utilities" and included several popular applications and Desk Accessories such as Jim's Font Editor, PSProcessor (Postscript pre-processor), MiniDesk, and Wizard. 

While the list of software releases from CMD grew in 1992, hardware development was still underway creating a replacement for the Commodore 1581 disk drive. CMD's FD Series floppy drives maintained backward compatibility with Commodore's 800K 1581, but also had the ability to format and use high density disks storing 1.6 Megabytes. The FD-4000, CMD's top-of-the-line model, provided further capacity with the ability to format and use enhanced density disks storing 3.2 Megabytes. Again, the same high-level DOS that CMD used in the HD and RAMLink product lines was ported to allow users to conveniently partition disks. By the end of 1992, the FD drives were shipping to Commodore users all over the world. 

The FD Series drives made their print debut in the very last issue of RUN Magazine -- the Nov/Dec 1992 issue. With the loss of RUN as an advertising avenue, CMD created close ties with Tech Media, the 'Special Products' division of RUN, which continued operation for several months after the magazine itself folded. CMD eventually purchased Tech Media in May of 1993 from International Data Group (IDG). The purchase included rights to all of the 8-bit holdings of Tech Media, including RUN and all of Tech Media's remaining Commodore-related product inventory. This single event changed CMD's role in the market significantly, instantly making them one of the largest dealers of Commodore products left in existence. 

With the purchase of Tech Media, CMD not only gained a large product inventory, but also took over responsibility for some of the vast backlog of unfilled orders created mostly through mismanagement by the order fulfillment company employed by Tech Media. The major portion of the backlog was for GEOS and GEOS application software produced by Geoworks (formerly Berkeley Softworks). CMD immediately contacted Geoworks, placing large orders for GEOS products. It was CMD's continued success at selling large quantities of GEOS products that eventually led Geoworks to grant CMD full production and distribution rights to the English-language versions of Geoworks' Commodore product line. 

Two more CMD products began shipping in 1993. CMD Utilities offered a selection of disk utilities and copiers useful to CMD device owners as well as other Commodore users. On the hardware front, CMD began shipping a new 3- button mouse at the end of 1993. The "SmartMouse" offered full backwards-compatibility with Commodore's 1351 mouse while adding an extra button, new GEOS drivers, and a built-in real-time clock. 

In 1994, CMD bought the rights to Skyles Electric Works' 2+1 cartridge port expander, and began offering this product. With the demise of another print magazine (Compute) at the end of 1993, CMD decided it was time to enter the publishing business. In late April of 1994, CMD shipped the first issue of Commodore World magazine. In August, CMD released "SmartTrack", a trackball with compatibility and features identical to that of their SmartMouse. By year's end CMD had released "geoCable II" for printing from GEOS, began providing computer and disk drive servicing, and started to offer both new and refurbished Commodore computers, drives and monitors. 

As 1995 began CMD launched the EX3 cartridge port expander, replacing the 2+1 which had turned out to be too expensive to produce and market effectively. The EX3, however, lacked the horizontal expansion port of the 2+1, so in May CMD released a modified version of the EX3 with this feature -- the EX2+1. 

In 1996, CMD unveiled the next big step in pushing Commodore computers to the edge of their capabilities -- the CMD SuperCPU 20 MHz Accelerator for the Commodore 64. This new product used the 65816 processor, a 16-bit big brother of the 6502 that is at the core of the processor in every Commodore 64 and Commodore 128 computer. The new accelerator offered up to 20 times the speed of stock Commodore computers, and promised the ability of expanding usable RAM to 16 MB at some future date. 

When 1997 arrived, so did the future... Commodore users were now able to add up to 16 MB of RAM to their systems if they had the CMD SuperCPU 64. And few months later, Commodore 128 users were able to get into the act as CMD released the SuperCPU 128 Accelerator. Applications for the Commodore 64 and the Commodore 128 could now both be accelerated, and some important software titles began to take advantage of the new speed Commodore computers were capable of. 

On June 1, 2001, CMD ceased all sales of Commodore-related items.

At 1:30 AM EDT Saturday, July 21 in the year 2001, CMD officially turned over its Commodore product line and all remaining order requests to Maurice Randall. It was with the financial assistance of several devoted Commodore enthusiasts that made this possible.