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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

#11

Post by rob74 »

> 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 browser falls back to the same serif font that is used for unstyled text (and if you have it installed, it's probably the default serif font or indistinguishable from it).

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

#12

Post by bombcar »

gnfargbl wrote: post #6
fortran77 wrote: post #3

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

> 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.

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

#13

Post by drzaiusx11 »

dwgumby wrote: post #7
fortran77 wrote: post #3

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

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 I can and even make my own (for fun, not profit.) I have a few Atari 2600 hardware clones I designed and built along with eprom cloning software and burning hardware. Not for any real reason, just because I like figuring out how hardware and software works and cloning is often a means to that end.

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

#14

Post by drzaiusx11 »

dwgumby wrote: post #8
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…

> 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 Which was kind of the point? If I remember correctly Woz had patents related to the video generation hardware which Franklin did change to try to avoid infringing but I can’t remember if the court agreed that it did it successfully.

Exactly what I was thinking when reading the article. The author implies "the nerve of them", when they're simply providing exactly what they advertise: a 100% compatible machine.

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

#15

Post by drzaiusx11 »

mentos wrote: post #5
ForHackernews wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. Cloning proprietary hardware is doing God's work. We should all hope someone in the modern era can knock off NVidia and Apple silicon. Competition is great for everyone except Apple shareholders.

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

They sold 100,000 of em. I bet there was more than one.

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

#16

Post by 404mm »

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…

Maybe it was done with MS FrontPage? I still remember that hot pile of garbage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage

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

#17

Post by ForHackernews »

404mm wrote: post #16
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…

Maybe it was done with MS FrontPage? I still remember that hot pile of garbage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage

No post body was provided.

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

#18

Post by Projectiboga »

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #14
dwgumby wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Which was kind of the point? If I remember correctly Woz had patents related to the video generation hardware which Franklin did change to try to avoid infringing but I can’t remember if the court agreed that it did it successfully.

Exactly what I was thinking when reading the article. The author implies "the nerve of them", when they're simply providing exactly what they advertise: a 100% compatible machine.

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-...

I got the computer with an 80 column graphics card one floppy drive and an amber monitor. It was less than a similar Apple bundle. I got mine in December 1980. I also got a disk of copy programs and a floppy with a few pirated games. Those two got me started as an early pirate video game collector. That was freshman year of high school. I grew out of video games a few years later. I did use it for word processing in college. I had a decent dot matrix printer which had a parallel interface but I chose to take floppy to a study location with a small printing lab. I would copy my file from the 5.5" to a 3.5" pro-dos formatted disc. Then open the doc in Word on a Mac and get it formatted nicer. I don't recall if Word had Auto-Format back then. And laser print my paper for a sharp look. I still keep a licensed Word on hand just for that single feature. I printed a few papers using my Franklin to Smith Corona typewriter via a cable, had an english teacher who didn't want dot matrix and that was more fun than typing manually. Whew this brought back a flood of my early tech memories.

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

#19

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#20

Post by Theodores »

The Franklin product I always wanted but never had was the REX. This was what PCMCIA slots were made for, a mini-organiser that was just cool in pre-iphone times, when any other organiser/PDA needed to be plugged in with some very slow cable.

Citizen made the REX and they sold it on to Xircom, so it wasn't as if Franklin did much apart from to add their peculiar style of marketing to it.

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