Xetec

Xetec was founded in 1983 by Jon Flickinger, and was located in Salina, KS, United States. Before closing in 1995, the company produced many third-party products for the Commodore 64, Commodore 128, Amiga, Macintosh, and PC computers.

The Lt. Kernal was 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 was its line of printer interfaces, which were required for people wanting to use "standard" (that is, parallel) printers with their Commodore computer. A survey of people still using their Commodore computers in 2000 showed that Xetec's printer interfaces were still the most popular in that category.

The Fontmaster line of word processing software provided 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 included SCSI interfaces, hard drives, CD-ROM drives, streaming tape drives, and RAM expansion. Xetec was the first to offer the immensely popular Fish disks collection on CD-ROM with their three-volume set of Fish & More discs.