Discussion

Such Bad Tech Ads

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

fortran77: I don’t understand why this post is so negative on Franklin. They seemed great.

ForHackernews: 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.

dwgumby: 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.

gnfargbl: > 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.

dwgumby: > 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 modificationsWhich 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.

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

drzaiusx11: They sold 100,000 of em. I bet there was more than one.

drzaiusx11: Exactly what I was thinking when reading the article. The author implies "the nerve of them", when they're simply providing exactly what they advertise: a 100% compatible machine.

drzaiusx11: 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.

bombcar: 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: I'm guessing Apple had stopped putting board schematics and ROM listings in their reference manuals after the ACE came out.

Theodores: 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.

Projectiboga: 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-...

drzaiusx11: 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...

msla: > 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.

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

bjord: who, benjamin franklin?

Projectiboga: They were able to get color working on the subsequent 1200 model. And I believe color was accessable via an expansion card, I didnt want to be staring at a tv at short distances so I was content to game in monochrome.

Shockingly, Franklin.com, with its 85 words of unstyled HTML, still links to the latest iterations of these devices.

rob74: > 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 undistinguishable from it).