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

rrfarley04 4 days ago 49 commentsRead Article on buttondown.com

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Discussion (49 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

rob74•about 5 hours 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).

ctmnt•about 3 hours 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•about 2 hours ago

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

celsoazevedo•about 1 hour ago

That part uses javascript to get the year: https://celsoazevedo.com/files/2026/franklin-date.png

The "Last-Modified" HTML header suggests it was last updated on "Sat, 05 Jul 2025 04:27:21 GMT": https://celsoazevedo.com/files/2026/franklin-mod.png

404mm•about 4 hours ago

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

ForHackernews•about 4 hours ago

NittLion78•about 1 hour 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

WillAdams•about 1 hour ago

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

NoSalt•about 1 hour 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•42 minutes 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.

WillAdams•about 6 hours ago

For the effect this had on Apple, see:

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

amelius•about 1 hour ago

Good artists copy, great artists steal ...

WillAdams•about 1 hour ago

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

MisterTea•about 4 hours 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.

justin66•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours ago

8 inch floppies! wow.

MisterTea•about 1 hour ago

The machine came with a few new boxes of 8" still in the cellophane.

josh11b•about 2 hours ago

> This newsletter does not contain ads, ...

It most definitely contains ads since it is about ads.

fortran77•about 6 hours ago

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

dwgumby•about 5 hours 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.

drzaiusx11•about 5 hours 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.

justin66•about 2 hours ago

> Unfortunately for Franklin, that also meant that full compatibility comes hand and hand with trademark & copyright violations.

Franklin eventually released a couple of clones which were compatible and had a clean BIOS (the 500 and 2000). I'm not sure about full compatibility but I never encountered anything that wouldn't run on my 500. To be fair, I got the thing in the mid nineties and only ran a few programs on it...

djmips•about 3 hours ago

How do you design Atari 2600 clones? Do you have to replicate the TIA?

shinjitsu•about 4 hours 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.

pimlottc•about 2 hours 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...

the_af•about 4 hours 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.

gnfargbl•about 5 hours 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.

bombcar•about 5 hours 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.

dhosek•about 3 hours ago

Indeed. There was a movie about the guy who invented the intermittent windshield wiper and I remember being surprised that one question that had to be addressed by the court in the patent trial was whether a circuit design was a patentable invention.

dwgumby•about 5 hours 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.

drzaiusx11•about 5 hours ago

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.

sehugg•about 4 hours 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.

msla•about 5 hours 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.

ForHackernews•about 6 hours 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•about 6 hours ago

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

drzaiusx11•about 5 hours ago

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

the_af•about 4 hours ago

That's how I feel about clones in general. Ok, I owned a real Commodore 64, but all my PCs during my formative years were clones.

Actually, this wasn't such a good example since I believe PC clones were legal. Let me change it to something more controversial:

I feel the same way about software piracy. All my games and software growing up were pirated. I didn't even understand this, because you got software by going to a store and buying it, e.g. C64 games... but it was all warez. Same with DOS or Windows (which one usually got from someone else). All of my early programming languages were pirated too: QuickBasic, GW Basic, Turbo C, Turbo Pascal, etc.

And this is how people got acquainted with computers, and then got into programming (games, systems, business software) as a job. So piracy was a net win.

msla•about 5 hours 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.

titzer•about 4 hours ago

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

alnwlsn•about 3 hours 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....

bjord•about 4 hours ago

who, benjamin franklin?

titzer•about 4 hours ago

Sorry, they--i.e. Franklin computer.

Theodores•about 4 hours 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.