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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

#71

Post by CamperBob2 »

pimlottc wrote: post #38
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/commen…

The whole article is just plain weird. They make it sound like a personal slight, and not a legal battle pitting two companies with a history of questionable behavior against each other.

As others have noted, it was far from a slam-dunk case that what Franklin did was illegal or unethical. "You could even pull a card out of an Apple and plug it in" is not exactly the rhetorical death blow that the author of this article was aiming for.

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

#72

Post by garyrob »

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

It may have been, I never used it, but it was also a very early, innovative (at the time) product made by a company called Vermeer.

There is a truly fascinating, and even inspiring, book about the company and the sale of FrontPage to Microsoft: https://www.amazon.com/High-Stakes-No-Prisoners-Internet/dp/...

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

#73

Post by technothrasher »

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…

I managed to score eight NeXTcubes from a small company getting rid of them one time about 1997. Similarly with all the manuals, boxes, software, etc. I wanted to share the treasure, and offered the extra to a bunch of my friends. Only I mathed wrong, and ended up promising all eight away. Oops. But at least I've still got my extremely early serial number C64.

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

#74

Post by WillAdams »

bigyabai wrote: post #69
WillAdams wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It was an interesting design, well-suited to the target audience and presents quite well in person (a co-worker bought two, one donated, the other for his personal use when hiking).

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

#75

Post by wildzzz »

ForHackernews wrote: post #4
fortran77 wrote: post #3

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

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.

I did this with some proprietary hardware. It's an HDMI encoder lor the original Xbox. I designed a PCB to be electrically compatible along with being compatible with running a binary provided by the original maker. I used the same microcontroller so it could be flashed using his binaries that I was able to extract from an app he distributes. Normally, you'd run the updater app on the Xbox which sends a firmware update over the SMBus to the microcontroller but it's easy to slice up the updater app to extract the firmware image. Then you can use an ST programmer to flash the image to my clone. Despite what it says on my GitHub, I did actually get it working but there's some irregularities between original Xbox revisions that make my design not universal. Oh well, at least it works for me and I didn't have to give this guy any of my money.

The whole project started because this guy changed the design of his HDMI encoder to move the microcontroller off the board and into another board he sells that provides an alternative BIOS for the Xbox. Meaning instead of paying $60 for one board, you now pay $50 for the neutered board plus $100 for his other board. Someone released a barebones board that had the same microcontroller (running his firmware) on it that could be connected to this neutered board and this guy sent a DMCA takedown notice to a site hosting the instructions on how to build it. A lot of people in the original Xbox modding community got upset so some people were looking for ways to build open source HDMI encoders as a means to kick the proprietary junk from the community. I took it a step further and just built a clone.

https://github.com/TeamFoxbat/XDV

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

#77

Post by ButlerianJihad »

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…

Most pirates are careful to strip out any copyright notices, but if Franklin did not consider themselves as pirates, then obviously the smart move is to retain the notice intact, because that is giving proper attribution. That seems like a good and ethical choice, considering the landscape at the time.

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

#78

Post by bigyabai »

WillAdams wrote: post #74
bigyabai wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It was an interesting design, well-suited to the target audience and presents quite well in person (a co-worker bought two, one donated, the other for his personal use when hiking).

By those qualifications we could very well nominate a Franklin machine for exhibit.

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

#79

Post by fortran77 »

dhosek wrote: post #36
drzaiusx11 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm scratching my head over your statement. You can see how they generated artifact color on the back porch of the colorburst by looking at the screen? You can see the phaase of their color reference wrt the pixel clock? Please explain.

See https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2021/10/apple-ii-compos... for how it really works.

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

#80

Post by alberto-m »

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…

I opened “view source” in Firefox and it showed the html in a different font than usual. Maybe it's just a fallback because the page contains Chinese characters, but I was quite surprised. A small page with a lot of mysteries.
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