About Microcosm
Microcosm was established in London in 1980, moving to Bristol in 1989.
The company has thrived by designing and producing innovative products for PCs. We produced the world's first PC RAM disk in the early '80s, followed by the world's first disk cache for PCs.
In 1989 we produced CopyControl Floppy, a totally new type of floppy disk copy protection system that was easy to use and immune to attacks from hackers. This in turn lead the way for CopyControl UnLock-It, an activation-based copy protection system that provided protection for software on any media. The KeyCall system enabled these activation codes to be supplied and applied automatically via the Internet or linked to an automated online payment system. In 1995 CopyControl Floppy received the Ziff-Davis Award for software excellence.
These software-based copy protection products were augmented by the introduction of Dinkey dongles, hardware devices that maintain the same high level of security by means of a small hardware key that attaches to the user’s computer. Dinkey dongles enforce the terms of software licensing and protects the software from being copied. The innovative design of these devices enabled them to be much smaller and less expensive than those of our competitors.
More recently, we produced CopyMinder that is a new software-based copy protection and licensing system. It uses the internet to monitor and control the usage of each software installation being protected. Previously, software-based copy protection software would stop software from running if it was not on the correct machine, but CopyMinder enables much more flexibility.
Building on our extensive knowledge in the Information Security sector we developed SmartSign, an identity and access management (IAM) solution that uses multi-factor authentication. SmartSign’s IAM system helps to protect the logins to network and internet connected applications and help manage the user life-cycle in a company. Multi-factor authentication adds more protection to your system than a regular username and password, as only users with the correct device can access the system.
Over the years our protection products have grown from strength to strength and now, we work on fulfilling the wider digital security needs of organisations with e-ID, e-Government and e-Health solutions. We incorporate either our existing or bespoke security software with hardware including PKI tokens, smart cards, smart card readers and OTP tokens to meet the requirements of our customers.
With over 5000 customers and millions of end-users throughout the world, we know the protection business better than anyone.
The combination of technical excellence and free, comprehensive technical support direct to the developers has resulted in many sales via recommendations from existing users. What better advertisement could we have?