Xetec

Last updated • 3 min readFrom Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Xetec, Inc.
Company type Corporation
Industry Personal computer, computer engineering
Founded Salina, Kansas, U.S. (1983 (1983))
FounderJon Flickinger
Defunct1995 (1995)
FateDiscontinued
Headquarters,
U.S.
Number of locations
1
Area served
Global
Products Lt. Kernal

Xetec /ˈztɛk/ 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, Commodore 128, Amiga, Macintosh, Atari ST and PC computers.

Contents

Overview

The Lt. Kernal 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. [1]

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 Micronics, 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). [2]

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. Fontmaster 128 was featured in the 1987 Consumer Electronics Show 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 Macintosh and PC computers, products for the RC hobby market, and spent a number of years in research and development of solid-state fluorescent lighting ballasts, for which Jon Flickinger holds two patents. [3] [4]

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". [5]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atari ST</span> Line of home computers from Atari Corporation

Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the company's 8-bit home computers. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985, and was widely available in July. It was the first personal computer with a bitmapped color graphical user interface, using a version of Digital Research's GEM interface / operating system from February 1985.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Commodore 1581</span>

The Commodore 1581 is a 3½-inch double-sided double-density floppy disk drive that was released by Commodore Business Machines (CBM) in 1987, primarily for its C64 and C128 home/personal computers. The drive stores 800 kilobytes using an MFM encoding but formats different from the MS-DOS, Amiga, and Mac Plus formats. With special software it's possible to read C1581 disks on an x86 PC system, and likewise, read MS-DOS and other formats of disks in the C1581, provided that the PC or other floppy handles the "720 kB" size format. This capability was most frequently used to read MS-DOS disks. The drive was released in the summer of 1987 and quickly became popular with bulletin board system (BBS) operators and other users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Commodore 64</span> 8-bit home computer introduced in 1982

The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International. It has been listed in the Guinness World Records as the highest-selling single computer model of all time, with independent estimates placing the number sold between 12.5 and 17 million units. Volume production started in early 1982, marketing in August for US$595. Preceded by the VIC-20 and Commodore PET, the C64 took its name from its 64 kilobytes(65,536 bytes) of RAM. With support for multicolor sprites and a custom chip for waveform generation, the C64 could create superior visuals and audio compared to systems without such custom hardware.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amiga 600</span> Home computer introduced in 1992

The Amiga 600, also known as the A600, is a home computer introduced in March 1992. It is the final Amiga model based on the Motorola 68000 and the 1990 Amiga Enhanced Chip Set. A redesign of the Amiga 500 Plus, it adds the option of an internal hard disk drive and a PCMCIA port. Lacking a numeric keypad, the A600 is only slightly larger than an IBM PC keyboard, weighing approximately 6 pounds (2.72kg). It shipped with AmigaOS 2.0, which was considered more user-friendly than earlier versions of the operating system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Commodore 128</span> Home computer released in 1985

The Commodore 128, also known as the C128, C-128, or C= 128, 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, the Commodore 64, the bestselling computer of the 1980s. Approximately 2.5 million C128s were sold during its four year production run.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Commodore PET</span> Personal computer system

The Commodore PET is a line of personal computers produced starting in 1977 by Commodore International. A single all-in-one case combines a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, Commodore BASIC in read-only memory, keyboard, monochrome monitor, and, in early models, a cassette deck.

KERNAL is Commodore's name for the ROM-resident operating system core in its 8-bit home computers; from the original PET of 1977, followed by the extended but related versions used in its successors: the VIC-20, Commodore 64, Plus/4, Commodore 16, and Commodore 128.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amiga A570</span>

The Amiga A570 is a single-speed external CD-ROM drive for the Amiga 500 computer launched by Commodore in 1992. It was designed to be compatible with Commodore CDTV software as well as being able to read ordinary ISO 9660 CD-ROM discs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Applied Engineering</span>

Applied Engineering, headquartered in Carrollton, Texas, was a leading third-party hardware vendor for Apple II computers from the early 1980s until the mid-1990s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Commodore 64 peripherals</span>

The Commodore 64 home computer used various external peripherals. Due to the backwards compatibility of the Commodore 128, most peripherals would also work on that system. There is also some compatibility with the VIC-20 and Commodore PET.

The Amiga computer can be used to emulate several other computer platforms, including legacy platforms such as the Commodore 64, and its contemporary rivals such as the IBM PC and the Macintosh.

Apple II serial cards primarily use the serial RS-232 protocol. They most often were used for communicating with printers, Modems, and less often for computer to computer data transfer. They can be programmed to interface with any number of external devices which were RS-232 compatible. Most serial cards have speed ranges starting from 110 bit/s up to 19,200 bit/s, however some can be modified to go much faster. The most popular and widely used of these cards was Apple Computer's Super Serial Card, a solid design that was often copied for maximum software compatibility of the end product.

Lt. Kernal is a SASI 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 38 kilobytes per second and 65 kilobytes per second in Commodore 128 fast mode.

Amiga support and maintenance software performs service functions such as formatting media for a specific filesystem, diagnosing failures that occur on formatted media, data recovery after media failure, and installation of new software for the Amiga family of personal computers—as opposed to application software, which performs business, education, and recreation functions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kickstart (Amiga)</span> Bootstrap firmware used by Amiga computers

Kickstart is the bootstrap firmware of the Amiga computers developed by Commodore International. Its purpose is to initialize the Amiga hardware and core components of AmigaOS and then attempt to boot from a bootable volume, such as a floppy disk. Most Amiga models were shipped with the Kickstart firmware stored on ROM chips.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amiga 1200</span> 1992 personal computer

The Amiga 1200, or A1200, is a personal computer in the Amiga computer family released by Commodore International, aimed at the home computer market. It was launched on October 21, 1992, at a base price of £399 in the United Kingdom and $599 in the United States.

IDEDOS is a ROM-based disk operating system written in 6502/65816 assembly language for the Commodore 64, 128 and SuperCPU. Its main purpose is to control ATA(PI) devices connected to an IDE64 cartridge and present them like normal Commodore drives. Additionally it supports networked drives (PCLink) and has a built-in machine code monitor and file manager.

In addition to the Amiga chipsets, various specially designed chips have been used in Commodore Amiga computers that do not belong to the 'Amiga chipset' in a tight sense.

CARDCO was a computer peripheral company during the 1980s in Wichita, Kansas, United States. CARDCO was well known in the Commodore 64 and VIC-20 community because of advertisements in numerous issues of Compute! magazine and availability of their products at large retailers, such as Target.

Commodore 64 disk/tape emulation and data transfer comprises hardware and software for Commodore 64 disk & tape emulation and for data transfer between either Commodore 64 (C64), Commodore (1541) disk drive or Commodore tape deck and newer computers.

References

  1. Lt. Kernal history
  2. Scanned Xetec user manuals
  3. Flickinger, Jon. "Patents by Inventor Jon Flickinger". Justia. Retrieved August 22, 2014.
  4. Flickinger, Jon. "Series resonant inverter and method of lamp starting". Google. Retrieved August 22, 2014.
  5. Eldridge, Richard H. (December 1986). "Fontmaster II". Compute's Gazette. pp. 92–97.