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
#2For the effect this had on Apple, see:
Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
#3I don’t understand why this post is so negative on Franklin. They seemed great.
Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
#4I 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.
Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
#5I 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.
Yea I feel like if even one kid was introduced to the world of computing through a Franklin it justifies their existence.
Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
#6I 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 forum had a comment claiming “they outright stole the Apple BIOS code, including -- bad move -- the copyright notice, itself.”
Building a functional equivalent is one thing, making a direct copy in a different case is another.
Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
#7I 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 place to work. It survived for years after the court decision and pivoted to making handheld gadgets. Their electronic Bible was apparently really popular in some circles.
Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
#8I 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…
> 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.
Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
#9I 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…
> 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.
My God, such an Architecture might have become an Industry Standard!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture
> The ISA term was coined as a retronym by IBM PC clone manufacturers in the late 1980s or early 1990s as a reaction to IBM attempts to replace the AT bus with its new and incompatible Micro Channel architecture.
Re: Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
#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 concept of "intellectual property" leads to things like the DMCA, where formerly legal acts are outlawed in a kind of "penumbra" or "emanation" from acts which are concretely illegal, because they're getting "too close" to the imaginary line.