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

https://buttondown.com/suchbadtechads/archive/franklin-ace-1000/

by rfarley04 • 3 months ago

126 93 3 months ago

buttondown.com

WillAdams8• 3 months ago

For the effect this had on Apple, see:

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

amelius3• 3 months ago

Good artists copy, great artists steal ...

WillAdams8• 3 months ago

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

chasil2• 3 months ago

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

WillAdams8• 3 months ago

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).

fortran772• 3 months ago

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

ForHackernews2• 3 months ago

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.

mentos• 3 months ago

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

wildzzz• 3 months ago

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

gnfargbl• 3 months ago

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.

dwgumby3• 3 months ago

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.

msla2• 3 months ago

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.

bombcar• 3 months ago

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.

sehugg• 3 months ago

I'm guessing Apple had stopped putting board schematics and ROM listings in their reference manuals by the time the ACE came out, or perhaps soon afterwards.

sleepybrett4• 3 months ago

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.

ButlerianJihad• 3 months ago

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.

protocolture• 3 months ago

Building a functional equivalent is one thing, making a direct copy in a different case is another.

Both are fine.

dwgumby3• 3 months ago

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.

drzaiusx118• 3 months ago

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.

shinjitsu2• 3 months ago

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.

mnurzia• 3 months ago

More details about the electronic bible (released in 1989):

http://pnylab.com/products/bible/main.html

Very interesting read and a neat product from a technical perspective. I'd like to know the specifics of the data structure used to compress and index the text.

the_af2• 3 months ago

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

The whole article is a framed as some kind of denunciation, but when I read it, it just seemed like a charming piece of computer history.

Bob Applegate's blog is also charming, but a bit difficult to navigate to find the good bits.

pimlottc• 3 months ago

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/comments/1o2y2gs/m...

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru4qPlTbJG4

2: https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC35folder/IBMt...

CamperBob2• 3 months ago

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.

mrandish• 3 months ago

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.

chasil2• 3 months ago

Compaq notably did this correctly.

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

msla2• 3 months ago

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.

titzer2• 3 months ago

Read the article. He copied the BIOS code straight up, including the copyright notice itself. That's blatant copyright infringement.

bjord• 3 months ago

who, benjamin franklin?

alnwlsn• 3 months ago

This was not understood to be so at the time, and the resulting court case was THE precedent that says that it is.

Franklin even won the initial case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Frankl....

rob74• 3 months ago

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).

404mm• 3 months ago

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

ForHackernews2• 3 months ago

garyrob• 3 months ago

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/...

ctmnt• 3 months ago

That is amazing. Compounded by the fact that there's a product listed as "COMING SOON JULY 2025"! This isn't an abandoned site.

fauria• 3 months ago

Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Electronic_Publishers

alberto-m• 3 months ago

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.

Theodores• 3 months ago

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.

MisterTea2• 3 months ago

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 became our gaming/VCR monitor. That monitor is still in my mothers basement.

Years later I'm working for a small business out on LI who never threw anything out. I got really lucky and obtained a full Franklin Ace 1200 with Sakata, Mits Altair 8800b and an IBM System 23. All in boxes. All manuals and software. Crazy. I took the whole haul home. I need to setup a museum/computer room one day.

justin665• 3 months ago

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

ern_ave• 3 months ago

8 inch floppies! wow.

sleepybrett4• 3 months ago

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.

technothrasher• 3 months ago

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.

josh11b• 3 months ago

This newsletter does not contain ads, ...

It most definitely contains ads since it is about ads.

NittLion78• 3 months ago

Never 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. Some of them were pretty fun. https://archive.org/details/gapa2

WillAdams8• 3 months ago

Possibly from Cognivox? I remember getting their voice synthesizer/recognition module for the Apple ][ at school when I was young.

sleepybrett4• 3 months ago

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.

NoSalt• 3 months ago

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???

jason_s• 3 months ago

Is 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.

LogicFailsMe• 3 months ago

The 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.

marshray• 3 months ago

Selling 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.

Philadelphia• 3 months ago

Ralph Archibold, the Ben Franklin impersonator the article mentions, was a legend in Philadelphia and a really nice guy. I met him back in 1999 when I was working for a city tourism agency.

badc0ffee• 3 months ago

The ACE 1000 also had a built-in power supply and 64k of RAM while Apple’s machine did not.

The Apple II series (except for the later //c) all had quality switching power supplies built-in. That was already something Apple was doing to set it apart from Commodore, Atari and Tandy.

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

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