CARDCO


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

History

CARDCO was founded by Ed J. Lippert II and Breck Ricketts. It went out of business in 1986 because of the decline in sales of C64 computers.
In 1986, they formed a new company called C-Ltd that manufactured peripherals for Amiga computers, and it eventually went out of business in 1989 as the Amiga computer sales declined.

Products

Printer interfaces

There were severe shortcomings of early Commodore printers, so CARDCO created the Card Print A printer interface that emulated Commodore printers by converting the Commodore serial interface to a Centronics parallel printer interface to allow numerous 3rd-party printers to be connected to a Commodore 64 or VIC-20.
A second model, a version that supported printer graphics was released called the Card Print +G, supported printing Commodore graphic characters using Epson ESC/P escape codes.
CARDCO released additional enhancements, including a model with RS-232 serial output, and shipped over two million total printer interfaces.
Common compatible printers were manufactured by Epson, Panasonic, Okidata, Star Micronics, and C. Itoh.

Cassette player interface

Unlike most other systems, Commodore computers could only use specialized cassette players, known as "Commodore Datasettes", to save data. CARDCO made an adaptor to work with normal cassette players.

Numpad

CARDCO made a numpad that plugged into both of the joystick ports on the Commodore 64.