Xetec was founded in 1983 by Jon Flickinger, and was located in

Salina, Kansas Salina is a city in and the county seat of Saline County, Kansas, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 46,889. In the early 1800s, the Kanza tribal land reached eastward from the middle of the Kansas Territory. In 1858 ...

, United States. Before closing in 1995, the company produced many third-party products for the

Commodore 64 The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit computing, 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International (first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7–10, 1982, in Las Vegas). It has been listed in ...

Commodore 128 The Commodore 128, also known as the C128, is the last 8-bit home computer that was commercially released by Commodore Business Machines (CBM). Introduced in January 1985 at the CES in Las Vegas, it appeared three years after its predecessor, t ...

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore International, Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-b ...

Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

Atari ST Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the company's Atari 8-bit computers, 8-bit computers. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985, and was widely available i ...

and PC computers.

Overview

The Lt. Kernal is the first third-party hard drive peripheral for

Commodore Commodore may refer to: Ranks * Commodore (rank), a naval rank ** Commodore (Royal Navy), in the United Kingdom ** Commodore (India), in India ** Commodore (United States) ** Commodore (Canada) ** Commodore (Finland) ** Commodore (Germany) or ' ...

computers. Originally developed by Fiscal Information in 1985, it was turned over to Xetec for manufacturing and customer support. Xetec's best selling product is its line of printer interfaces, which allows the use of many models of non-Commodore parallel-interface printers with Commodore computers. Some of the popular printers of that era that are supported include

Canon Canon or Canons may refer to: Arts and entertainment * Canon (fiction), the material accepted as officially written by an author or an ascribed author * Literary canon, an accepted body of works considered as high culture ** Western canon, th ...

, C-Itoh,

Star Micronics is a Japanese multinational electronic components and printer manufacturing company headquartered in Shizuoka, Japan. It was founded in 1947 as a precision processor of miniature components, later expanding into automatic lathes, printers ...

Epson Seiko Epson Corporation, commonly known as Epson, is a Japanese multinational electronics company and one of the world's largest manufacturers of printers and information- and imaging-related equipment. Headquartered in Suwa, Nagano, Japan, t ...

NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered at the NEC Supertower in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It provides IT and network solutions, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), Inte ...

Okidata , commonly referred to as OKI, OKI Electric or the OKI Group, is a Japanese information and communications technology company, headquartered in Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo and operating in over 120 countries around the world. OKI produced the fi ...

, and

Panasonic is a Japanese multinational electronics manufacturer, headquartered in Kadoma, Osaka, Kadoma, Japan. It was founded in 1918 as in Fukushima-ku, Osaka, Fukushima by Kōnosuke Matsushita. The company was incorporated in 1935 and renamed and c ...

. Early interface models (such as the "Serial Printer Interface" and "Graphics Printer Interface") simply convert from Commodore's serial format to the more standard Centronics parallel interface, with only minimal

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

conversions and graphic character printing. The Super Graphix Jr adds support for 50+ printers and " Near Letter Quality", which is a technique of using multi-pass graphic printing to achieve higher quality text printing. The more sophisticated Super Graphix also adds an 8K data buffer,

screen dump A screenshot (also known as screen capture or screen grab) is an analog or digital image that shows the contents of a computer display. A screenshot is created by a (film) camera shooting the screen or the operating system or software running o ...

support, two user-loadable fonts (from a library of fonts on the included disk), and a font creation program. The Super Graphix Gold adds a 32K buffer, 4 fixed and 4 user-loadable fonts (from a library of fonts on disk), 10 font printing effects, picture printing, built-in screen dump programs, fast-serial support, and the rather unusual ability to interface a printer directly to a disk drive (for printing pictures and loading fonts directly from disk). The Fontmaster line of word processing software provides Commodore users the ability to exploit the graphics capabilities just emerging in printers of the day in order to produce documents containing a mixture of font styles, sizes and effects as well as embedded pictures. Although lacking the power and flexibility of word processors available today, it was ground-breaking in its day, winning an ''Outstanding Original Programming'' award at the 1985

Consumer Electronics Show CES (; formerly an initialism for Consumer Electronics Show) is an annual trade show organized by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). Held in January at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Winchester, Nevada, United States, the event typi ...

. Fontmaster 128 was featured in the 1987

Software Showcase. Xetec's offerings for the Amiga include

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices, best known for its use with storage devices such as hard disk drives. SCSI was introduced ...

interfaces,

hard drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...

CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains computer data storage, data computers can read, but not write or erase. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold b ...

drives, streaming

tape drive A tape drive is a data storage device that reads and writes data on a magnetic tape. Magnetic-tape data storage is typically used for offline, archival data storage. Tape media generally has a favorable unit cost and long archival stability. ...

s, and RAM expansion. Xetec was the first to offer the popular Fish disks collection on CD-ROM with their three-volume set of ''Fish & More'' discs. Xetec also developed a few products for

and PC computers, products for the RC hobby market, and spent a number of years in research and development of solid-state

fluorescent Fluorescence is one of two kinds of photoluminescence, the emission of light by a substance that has absorbed light or other electromagnetic radiation. When exposed to ultraviolet radiation, many substances will glow (fluoresce) with color ...

lighting ballasts, for which Jon Flickinger holds two patents. In summary, Xetec's total list of products include these: Lt. Kernal, Serial Printer Interface, Graphics Printer Interface, Super Graphix, Super Graphix Jr, Super Graphix Gold, Graphix AT, Fontmaster, Fontmaster II, Fontmaster 128, Printer Enhancer, FastTape, FastTrak, FastCard, FastCard Plus, MiniFastCard, FastRAM, ''Fish & More'' (vols. I, II, III), CDx CD-ROM Filesystem, CDx 650, Beeping Tomm, SuperWriter 924, SCAD.

Reception

'' Compute!'s Gazette'' in 1986 called the $49.95 ''Fontmaster II'' "a terrific value, and well worth the trouble of learning some new commands in exchange for the excellent printouts it delivers".

Overview

Reception

References

External links