Creative Micro Designs

» see cmdweb.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Commodore International went bankrupt in April 1994. A company in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts went on designing and manufacturing new hardware for Commodore's computers for another seven years after that, and for a while the best peripherals a Commodore 64 had ever been able to buy were being made for a machine whose manufacturer no longer existed.

Doug Cotton and Mark Fellows founded Creative Micro Designs in 1987. The first product was JiffyDOS, a replacement disk operating system that kept full compatibility with Commodore drives while making them several times faster, sold as a pair of ROM chips you installed yourself. That set the pattern for everything after, which was to build the parts Commodore itself had never bothered to make well. The CMD-HD from 1990 was a SCSI hard drive for the C64, eventually up to four gigabytes on a machine with 64 kilobytes of RAM. RAMLink was a cartridge-port RAM disk up to 16 megabytes. The FD-2000 in 1992 and the FD-4000 after it were high-density 3.5 inch drives. SwiftLink and Turbo232 were serial cards that let a C64 hold a modem connection fast enough to be worth having.

The SuperCPU 64 arrived in 1996: a 20 MHz 65816 accelerator cartridge, expandable to 16 megabytes, for a computer that had shipped in 1982 at roughly 1 MHz. In 2001 CMD stopped selling and supporting Commodore products. That July it sold an exclusive license to produce and sell the whole line to a single programmer, Maurice Randall, whose company Click Here Software kept the parts available until around 2009. CMD itself moved to PC-compatible business and was dissolved in 2009, which means the corporation outlived its own reason to exist by eight years.

~ the case file ~

~ a hard drive for a breadbin ~

There is a particular engineering problem in building a four-gigabyte SCSI drive for a computer whose disk operating system was designed around a 170 kilobyte floppy. The C64's filesystem has no concept of a volume that size, so CMD had to partition the drive into units the machine could address and then teach the machine to switch between them. The same goes for the accelerator: a 65816 at 20 MHz breaks software that counts CPU cycles to do sound and video timing, which on the C64 was most software, so the SuperCPU needed a switch on the cartridge to drop back to normal speed.

That is the shape of the whole aftermarket. Every product was a workaround for a design decision made in 1982 by a company that had since gone under, sold to a customer base that had already decided against buying a newer machine.

~ Commodore World ~

In April 1994, the same month Commodore collapsed, CMD started publishing a magazine. Commodore World ran until 1999 and then passed to the German publisher CSW-Verlag. A hardware company publishing the magazine for its own platform is a sign of how small the room had become: there was no longer an independent press for the machine, so the remaining vendor became the press. It also meant the ads and the editorial came from the same place, which nobody seems to have minded much, because the alternative was no magazine.

~ the license passed on ~

What happened in 2001 reads as a handoff rather than a bankruptcy. CMD sold the rights rather than closing the products down, Click Here Software carried them for eight more years, and in 2010 Jim Brain's Retro Innovations picked up the license and still sells JiffyDOS ROMs today, for machines and drive models CMD never shipped for. The product line is 39 years old and buyable.

None of this reached me, and the year is only half the reason. Turkey had a real Commodore 64 population in the 1980s and I came online in 1998 on a PC, so the overlap was always going to be thin. The harder barrier is that CMD sold by mail order out of Massachusetts to customers who could write a US check. There was no importer and no local dealer, and getting $200 from Ankara to East Longmeadow in 1996 with a cartridge coming back was not a thing a teenager could arrange. The American Commodore scene in the late 90s was buying new hard drives and 20 MHz accelerators for these machines while the same machines here were already in cupboards, and what separated the two was the post office and the payment.

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