That was a great read, and I loved the retro computer ads. It really makes me nostalgic for the heady days of the "wild west" of home computers and the internet.
* Under Construction * anyone???
Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
51–60 of 99 posts
Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
#52Earlier 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...
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Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
#53Is there no end to the burgeoning websites using fixed-width fonts for text? We're not using ASCII terminals anymore... oh, to be able to read text more easily.
Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
8 inch floppies! wow.
Yeah, that's extremely cool. The wiki page had me at:
The Datamaster was IBM's only 8-bit microcomputer and one of the few to use the EBCDIC encoding.
Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
#55The sheer amount of bull$h!+ power granted to AAPL over clones and emulation is one of the early reasons we cannot have nice things now. I'm trying to post the sad saga of David Small and The Magic Sac but apparently that story is behind paywalls because of course it is. But despite AAPL crushing The Magic Sac, no one could crush emulation in the end so there's hope.
Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
#56Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
#57Never used a Franklin, but I remember the Albert which was a IIe clone. Had a voice synthesizer which you could type words into and it would say them back (poorly) which as a young kid was a good time. Also had a stylus/drawpad for graphics which was kinda neat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_(computer) I remember the text Games Apples Play and typing the code manually in from the pages on that machine in Basic…
My friend, who's data was a swapmeet/fleamarket/gunshow guy, brought one home (a franklin 500, the //c clone) for him. Seemed to run all the pirated floppies that I the friend group had accumulated for our //e's just fine. I remember liking it's black and grey case/keyboard colorscheme.
Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
#58The 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
My uncles dairy had a datamaster in a back office that they used for the books, etc. I wonder what happened that that, it's no doubt stuffed into some haybarn loft.
Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
Growing up my friend had one (a 500), I don't remember finding anything in my pile of pirated floppies that he couldn't run.
Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
#60Selling clones of name-brand personal computers! What has this world come to?
I hope the courts will stamp out these Intellectual Property thieves quickly or they will become a real threat to computing.