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Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

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Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

#31

Post by MisterTea »

The first computer I touched was a Franklin Ace 1200 which my father bought. It had a joystick and a Sakata video monitor. The first game I remember playing is Short Circuit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoY8iWJAgVQ. It was replaced by a Canon 8088 then by an AT&T PC6300. I don't know who my father sold it to but he kept the Sakata and it floated around until I realized you could hook a Nintendo to it. Then it became our gaming/VCR monitor. That monitor is still in my mothers basement.

Years later I'm working for a small business out on LI who never threw anything out. I got really lucky and obtained a full Franklin Ace 1200 with Sakata, Mits Altair 8800b and an IBM System 23. All in boxes. All manuals and software. Crazy. I took the whole haul home. I need to setup a museum/computer room one day.

Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

#32

Post by Projectiboga »

the_af wrote: post #27
mentos wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea I feel like if even one kid was introduced to the world of computing through a Franklin it justifies their existence.

That's how I feel about clones in general. Ok, I owned a real Commodore 64, but all my PCs during my formative years were clones. Actually, this wasn't such a good example since I believe PC clones were legal. Let me change it to something more controversial: I feel the same way about software piracy. All my games and software growing up were pirated. I didn't even understand this, because you got software by going t…

I do recall the assistant at the store when I first showed up said wait for the upcoming Commodore 64 more stuff for much less money. But as a 14 year old I wasn't ready to wait after being exposed to Apple the summer before. That professor really advocated for the Atari 800 and I really considered it, but the Apple's easier to copy floppies along with a much larger user base won me over.

Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

#33

Post by ctmnt »

rob74 wrote: post #11

> Shockingly, Franklin.com, with its 85 words of unstyled HTML, still links to the latest iterations of these devices. If you look at the source code of this page, you'll be even more shocked: looks like it's simply a MS Word document saved as HTML, it's overly complicated and contains lots of "Mso*" classes. And no, it's not unstyled either, it's just that on computers that don't have Times New Roman installed, the…

That is amazing. Compounded by the fact that there's a product listed as "COMING SOON JULY 2025"! This isn't an abandoned site.

Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

#34

Post by alnwlsn »

titzer wrote: post #22
msla wrote: post #10

> But Franklin Computer Corporation’s hardware, software, and ad concepts were stolen intellectual property, which, I think, qualifies as “bad.” "Intellectual property" is doing a lot of work in this sentence, in that it's a legal-sounding blanket term which somehow fails to mention which actual law Franklin broke. It's implying something is illegal without actually making the case. The cancerous growth of the vague…

Read the article. He copied the BIOS code straight up, including the copyright notice itself. That's blatant copyright infringement.

This was not understood to be so at the time, and the resulting court case was THE precedent that says that it is.

Franklin even won the initial case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Frankl....

Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

#35

Post by dhosek »

bombcar wrote: post #12
gnfargbl wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apparently, when Steve Wozniak first got his hands on an ACE 1000-series machine, “he felt that Franklin had even copied the circuit-board layout, right down to how the chips were arranged.” Reviewers were even able to pull cards out of an Apple ][ motherboard, plug them into an ACE machine, and they’d work without any other modifications. And while I couldn’t verify this claim anywhere else, one retro hardware for…

It is now determined to be "bad" but the whole area wasn't as clearly legally defined as we think it is now. The courts could have almost as easily ruled for Franklin and determined that "BIOS" is a hardware implementation and not copyrightable.

Indeed. There was a movie about the guy who invented the intermittent windshield wiper and I remember being surprised that one question that had to be addressed by the court in the patent trial was whether a circuit design was a patentable invention.

Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

#36

Post by dhosek »

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #25
Projectiboga wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had one, I believe they never delivered on the color compatibility. Mine came with an easy on the eyes amber crt. Here it is the Ace 1000 was greyscale only but was 80 column. Wohlscheid - Computer Ads from the Past Unfortunately, the Franklin didn't copy the Apple's ability to display color graphics. It was limited to “shades of grey and black and white”. https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/franklins-ace…

To be fair, the way Woz did color on the ][ was pretty wild, but unfortunate they weren't able to properly copy that as well...

Screens were low enough resolution back then that you could look closely at the screen to see how he got the six hires colors.

Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

#37

Post by djmips »

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #13
dwgumby wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Franklin and was one an early hire. Using the Apple ROM code was an explicit choice. There was no real defined API so a lot of apps called random routines in ROM or referenced arbitrary ROM data and if it wasn’t there the app broke. Franklin’s argument was that the ROM was the API and if you wanted to be compatible it had to be identical. Court didn’t agree, probably rightfully so. But Franklin was a fun…

Honestly their argument works for me. It truly cannot be "100% compatible" without sharing the same memory layout/contents in this case. Unfortunately for Franklin, that also meant that full compatibility comes hand and hand with trademark & copyright violations. I find it more "sad" than "upsetting" as the original author implies in this piece. Personally, I love cloned hardware and software. I seek out clones when…

How do you design Atari 2600 clones? Do you have to replicate the TIA?

Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

#38

Post by pimlottc »

fortran77 wrote: post #3

I don’t understand why this post is so negative on Franklin. They seemed great.

And honestly what’s wrong with the ads? Sure, they’re a bit cheesy, but not really that much out of the ordinary for magazine ads back then. There were certainly much worse (sensational, sexiest) ones…

Let’s not forget, IBM themselves used Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” [0][1][2] in their home computer ads for quite a while back then, so this isn’t that different.

0: https://old.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1o2y2gs/m...

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru4qPlTbJG4

2: https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC35folder/IBMt...

Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

#39

Post by justin66 »

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #13
dwgumby wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Franklin and was one an early hire. Using the Apple ROM code was an explicit choice. There was no real defined API so a lot of apps called random routines in ROM or referenced arbitrary ROM data and if it wasn’t there the app broke. Franklin’s argument was that the ROM was the API and if you wanted to be compatible it had to be identical. Court didn’t agree, probably rightfully so. But Franklin was a fun…

Honestly their argument works for me. It truly cannot be "100% compatible" without sharing the same memory layout/contents in this case. Unfortunately for Franklin, that also meant that full compatibility comes hand and hand with trademark & copyright violations. I find it more "sad" than "upsetting" as the original author implies in this piece. Personally, I love cloned hardware and software. I seek out clones when…

> Unfortunately for Franklin, that also meant that full compatibility comes hand and hand with trademark & copyright violations.

Franklin eventually released a couple of clones which were compatible and had a clean BIOS (the 500 and 2000). I'm not sure about full compatibility but I never encountered anything that wouldn't run on my 500. To be fair, I got the thing in the mid nineties and only ran a few programs on it...

Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

#40

Post by justin66 »

MisterTea wrote: post #31

The first computer I touched was a Franklin Ace 1200 which my father bought. It had a joystick and a Sakata video monitor. The first game I remember playing is Short Circuit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoY8iWJAgVQ . It was replaced by a Canon 8088 then by an AT&T PC6300. I don't know who my father sold it to but he kept the Sakata and it floated around until I realized you could hook a Nintendo to it. Then it be…

> IBM System 23

Not to discount the awesomeness of the others, but that's a real prize. Talk about a strange artifact of its time and place!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/23_Datamaster

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