[HN Gopher] Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the belov...
___________________________________________________________________
Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator
they depict
Author : rfarley04
Score : 122 points
Date : 2026-04-10 19:33 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (buttondown.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (buttondown.com)
| WillAdams wrote:
| For the effect this had on Apple, see:
|
| https://www.folklore.org/Stolen_From_Apple.html
| amelius wrote:
| Good artists copy, great artists steal ...
| WillAdams wrote:
| Please provide one example of "art" which Franklin
| originated.
| amelius wrote:
| I mean, if you put a Mac or MacOS in a museum next to
| Picasso, that would make many people cry.
|
| When people think of a Mac as "art", we call that an
| occupational hazard.
|
| So if you call a Mac art, you might as well call any
| computer art.
| WillAdams wrote:
| 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=1029
| 5
|
| (and there are 24 other items by Apple in that
| collection)
|
| and yes, they have a Picasso as well:
|
| https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5530
| bigyabai wrote:
| 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
| WillAdams wrote:
| 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).
| bigyabai wrote:
| By those qualifications we could very well nominate a
| Franklin machine for exhibit.
| chasil wrote:
| 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
| WillAdams wrote:
| 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).
| fortran77 wrote:
| I don't understand why this post is so negative on Franklin. They
| seemed great.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yea I feel like if even one kid was introduced to the world
| of computing through a Franklin it justifies their existence.
| drzaiusx11 wrote:
| They sold 100,000 of em. I bet there was more than one.
| the_af wrote:
| 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.
| Projectiboga wrote:
| I do recall the assistant at the store when I first
| showed up said wait for the upcoming Commodore 64 more
| stuff for much less money. But as a 14 year old I wasn't
| ready to wait after being exposed to Apple the summer
| before. That professor really advocated for the Atari 800
| and I really considered it, but the Apple's easier to
| copy floppies along with a much larger user base won me
| over.
| wildzzz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _> 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Projectiboga wrote:
| 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-...
|
| I got the computer with an 80 column graphics card one
| floppy drive and an amber monitor. It was less than a
| similar Apple bundle. I got mine in December 1980. I also
| got a disk of copy programs and a floppy with a few
| pirated games. Those two got me started as an early
| pirate video game collector. That was freshman year of
| high school. I grew out of video games a few years later.
| I did use it for word processing in college. I had a
| decent dot matrix printer which had a parallel interface
| but I chose to take floppy to a study location with a
| small printing lab. I would copy my file from the 5.5" to
| a 3.5" pro-dos formatted disc. Then open the doc in Word
| on a Mac and get it formatted nicer. I don't recall if
| Word had Auto-Format back then. And laser print my paper
| for a sharp look. I still keep a licensed Word on hand
| just for that single feature. I printed a few papers
| using my Franklin to Smith Corona typewriter via a cable,
| had an english teacher who didn't want dot matrix and
| that was more fun than typing manually. Whew this brought
| back a flood of my early tech memories.
| drzaiusx11 wrote:
| 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...
| Projectiboga wrote:
| 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.
| dhosek wrote:
| Screens were low enough resolution back then that you
| could look closely at the screen to see how he got the
| six hires colors.
| fortran77 wrote:
| 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.
| msla wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sehugg wrote:
| 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.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dwgumby wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| djmips wrote:
| How do you design Atari 2600 clones? Do you have to
| replicate the TIA?
| justin66 wrote:
| > 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...
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Growing up my friend had one (a 500), I don't remember
| finding anything in my pile of pirated floppies that he
| couldn't run.
| shinjitsu wrote:
| 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.
| dwgumby wrote:
| When it started it was a scrappy startup, a handful of
| people. I went there because my old boss, Dave McWherter,
| essentially was the engineering department. Grew slowly to
| maybe a hundred people. Then exploded to several times that
| at least. At the end there were active projects for: a
| portable Apple II clone, a PC clone, portable CP/M machine
| (think Osbourne One), MSX game machine, and probably more.
| Way too big way too fast.
|
| So I have to ask, who is your uncle and where did he work
| in Franklin?
| the_af wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| chasil wrote:
| Compaq notably did this correctly.
|
| https://wiki.softhistory.org/wiki/Compaq_BIOS
| msla wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Read the article. He copied the BIOS code straight up,
| including the copyright notice itself. That's blatant copyright
| infringement.
| bjord wrote:
| who, benjamin franklin?
| titzer wrote:
| Sorry, _they_ --i.e. Franklin computer.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| Maybe it was done with MS FrontPage? I still remember that hot
| pile of garbage.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage
| ForHackernews wrote:
| <meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 15 (filtered)">
| chocochunks wrote:
| Word 15 is Office 2013 lol.
| garyrob wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Also, the footer reads "(c) 2026 FEP Holding Company LLC"
| (probably not automated, the web seems like an HTML exported
| Word document).
|
| Wikipedia article:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Electronic_Publishers
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| 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
| alberto-m wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| MisterTea wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 8 inch floppies! wow.
| MisterTea wrote:
| The machine came with a few new boxes of 8" still in the
| cellophane.
| justin66 wrote:
| Yeah, that's extremely cool. The wiki page had me at:
|
| _The Datamaster was IBM 's only 8-bit microcomputer and
| one of the few to use the EBCDIC encoding._
| sleepybrett wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > This newsletter does not contain ads, ...
|
| It most definitely contains ads since it is about ads.
| NittLion78 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Possibly from Cognivox? I remember getting their voice
| synthesizer/recognition module for the Apple ][ at school when
| I was young.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
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(page generated 2026-04-14 23:01 UTC)