Xetec was founded in 1983 by Jon Flickinger, and was located in Salina, Kansas, 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 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 the Guinness ...

Commodore 128 The Commodore 128, also known as the C128, C-128, C= 128,The "C=" represents the graphical part of the logo. is the last 8-bit home computer that was commercially released by Commodore Business Machines (CBM). Introduced in January 1985 at the ...

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

Atari ST The Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the Atari 8-bit family. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985 and was widely available in July. It was the first pers ...

and PC computers.

Overview

The

Lt. Kernal Lt. Kernal is a SCSI hard drive subsystem developed for the 8-bit Commodore 64 and Commodore 128 home computers. The Lt. Kernal is capable of a data transfer rate of more than per second and 65 kilobytes per second in Commodore 128 fast mod ...

is the first third-party hard drive peripheral for Commodore 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, C-Itoh, Star Micronix, Epson, NEC, Okidata, and Panasonic. 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 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 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).Scanned Xetec user manuals
/ref> 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 interfaces, hard drives, CD-ROM drives, streaming tape drives, 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 the emission of light by a substance that has absorbed light or other electromagnetic radiation. It is a form of luminescence. In most cases, the emitted light has a longer wavelength, and therefore a lower photon energy, tha ...

lighting ballasts, for which Jon Flickinger holds two patents. In summary, Xetec's total list of products include these:

, 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