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

buttondown.com

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

#61

Post by sleepybrett »

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…

I dunno, the more I age the more I think that the wild west that was created during the initial boom of personal computers was the best thing that probably ever happened. Without it the 'PC' (and by this i mean personal computers) revolution may not have even happened (the ibm pc clone ecosystem BECAME the ECOSYSTEM and IBM was denied a monopoly). I think we would have been in the walled garden computing ecosystem immediately and it would have become much more extreme that even where we are today, cross compatibility would be shit, linux may never have happened, etc.

How many kids who's parents couldn't afford an apple computer got a franklin instead allowing that kid to grow up and invent great things both open and closed source.

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

#62

Post by mrandish »

fortran77 wrote: post #3

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

From a modern context, I think it's hard to appreciate that in 1981 it wasn't clear that a computer BIOS would be copyrightable. Franklin even won the initial court case.

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

#63

Post by chasil »

WillAdams wrote: post #2

For the effect this had on Apple, see: https://www.folklore.org/Stolen_From_Apple.html

Bearing in mind that Jobs famously intended to "knife the baby," referring to the cash flow from the 6502 machines, it is ironic that he fought to stop this clone.

I remember this phrase from a stage play, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, but Google shows this source:

https://www.theregister.com/1998/11/06/were_talking_about_kn...

The play doesn't even have its own wiki.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Daisey#The_Agony_and_the_...

He also put a stop to the clone PowerMacs when he returned to Apple in the 90s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone

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

#64

Post by throwaway613746 »

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…

[dead]

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

#65

Post by amelius »

WillAdams wrote: post #49
amelius wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good artists copy, great artists steal ...

Please provide one example of "art" which Franklin originated.

I mean, if you put a Mac or MacOS in a museum next to Picasso, that would make many people cry.

When people think of a Mac as "art", we call that an occupational hazard.

So if you call a Mac art, you might as well call any computer art.

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

#66

Post by chasil »

mrandish wrote: post #62
fortran77 wrote: post #3

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

From a modern context, I think it's hard to appreciate that in 1981 it wasn't clear that a computer BIOS would be copyrightable. Franklin even won the initial court case.

Compaq notably did this correctly.

https://wiki.softhistory.org/wiki/Compaq_BIOS

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

#67

Post by WillAdams »

chasil wrote: post #63
WillAdams wrote: post #2

For the effect this had on Apple, see: https://www.folklore.org/Stolen_From_Apple.html

Bearing in mind that Jobs famously intended to "knife the baby," referring to the cash flow from the 6502 machines, it is ironic that he fought to stop this clone. I remember this phrase from a stage play, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs , but Google shows this source: https://www.theregister.com/1998/11/06/were_talking_about_kn... The play doesn't even have its own wiki. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Da…

Yeah, but the Apple ][ was so vital to Apple's survival/cash flow that they made a disastrous deal:

https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html

and the PowerMac clones weren't doing anything interesting and were simply cannibalizing Mac sales, cutting into Apple's profits --- really wish at least one of them had made a tablet unit w/ a Wacom digitizer, but that was too small a market as Axiotron found when they did the ModBook (which I still regret not buying).

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

#68

Post by WillAdams »

amelius wrote: post #65
WillAdams wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please provide one example of "art" which Franklin originated.

I mean, if you put a Mac or MacOS in a museum next to Picasso, that would make many people cry. When people think of a Mac as "art", we call that an occupational hazard. So if you call a Mac art, you might as well call any computer art.

I can remember the 16-page _Newsweek_ ad quite vividly --- the Mac was something special, and even its spiritual successor, the NeXT Cube did not reach the level of artistic flair which the Mac hit as a quick perusal of:

https://www.folklore.org

would argue.

Moreover, it made the cut at at least one museum:

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/3742?artist_id=10295

(and there are 24 other items by Apple in that collection)

and yes, they have a Picasso as well:

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5530

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

#69

Post by bigyabai »

WillAdams wrote: post #68
amelius wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if you put a Mac or MacOS in a museum next to Picasso, that would make many people cry. When people think of a Mac as "art", we call that an occupational hazard. So if you call a Mac art, you might as well call any computer art.

I can remember the 16-page _Newsweek_ ad quite vividly --- the Mac was something special, and even its spiritual successor, the NeXT Cube did not reach the level of artistic flair which the Mac hit as a quick perusal of: https://www.folklore.org would argue. Moreover, it made the cut at at least one museum: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/3742?artist_id=10295 (and there are 24 other items by Apple in that colle…

Anything can make the cut at MOMA. The gigantic disaster of OLPC is enshrined as "art" there too: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/155757

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

#70

Post by dwgumby »

shinjitsu wrote: post #28
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…

How big was the Franklin back then? My uncle worked there in the 1980s, but I was a kid and have no concept of if it was a scappy startup or a midsized company.

When it started it was a scrappy startup, a handful of people. I went there because my old boss, Dave McWherter, essentially was the engineering department. Grew slowly to maybe a hundred people. Then exploded to several times that at least. At the end there were active projects for: a portable Apple II clone, a PC clone, portable CP/M machine (think Osbourne One), MSX game machine, and probably more. Way too big way too fast.

So I have to ask, who is your uncle and where did he work in Franklin?

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