> <i>Shockingly, Franklin.com, with its 85 words of unstyled HTML, still links to the latest iterations of these devices.</i><p>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).
That is amazing. Compounded by the fact that there's a product listed as "COMING SOON JULY 2025"! This isn't an abandoned site.
Also, the footer reads "© 2026 FEP Holding Company LLC" (probably not automated, the web seems like an HTML exported Word document).<p>Wikipedia article: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Electronic_Publishers" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Electronic_Publishers</a>
That part uses javascript to get the year: <a href="https://celsoazevedo.com/files/2026/franklin-date.png" rel="nofollow">https://celsoazevedo.com/files/2026/franklin-date.png</a><p>The "Last-Modified" HTML header suggests it was last updated on "Sat, 05 Jul 2025 04:27:21 GMT": <a href="https://celsoazevedo.com/files/2026/franklin-mod.png" rel="nofollow">https://celsoazevedo.com/files/2026/franklin-mod.png</a>
Maybe it was done with MS FrontPage? I still remember that hot pile of garbage. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage</a>
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Selling clones of name-brand personal computers! What has this world come to?<p>I hope the courts will stamp out these Intellectual Property thieves quickly or they will become a real threat to computing.
For the effect this had on Apple, see:<p><a href="https://www.folklore.org/Stolen_From_Apple.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.folklore.org/Stolen_From_Apple.html</a>
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.<p>I remember this phrase from a stage play, <i>The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs</i>, but Google shows this source:<p><a href="https://www.theregister.com/1998/11/06/were_talking_about_knifing/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/1998/11/06/were_talking_about_kn...</a><p>The play doesn't even have its own wiki.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Daisey#The_Agony_and_the_Ecstasy_of_Steve_Jobs" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Daisey#The_Agony_and_the_...</a><p>He also put a stop to the clone PowerMacs when he returned to Apple in the 90s.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone</a>
Yeah, but the Apple ][ was so vital to Apple's survival/cash flow that they made a disastrous deal:<p><a href="https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html</a><p>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).
Good artists copy, great artists steal ...
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: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoY8iWJAgVQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoY8iWJAgVQ</a>. 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.<p>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.
> IBM System 23<p>Not to discount the awesomeness of the others, but that's a real prize. Talk about a strange artifact of its time and place!<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/23_Datamaster" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/23_Datamaster</a>
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. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_(computer)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_(computer)</a><p>I remember the text <i>Games Apples Play</i> and typing the code manually in from the pages on that machine in Basic. Some of them were pretty fun. <a href="https://archive.org/details/gapa2" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/gapa2</a>
Possibly from Cognivox? I remember getting their voice synthesizer/recognition module for the Apple ][ at school when I was young.
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.
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.<p>* Under Construction * anyone???
> This newsletter does not contain ads, ...<p>It most definitely contains ads since it is about ads.
I 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 <i>was</i> the API and if you wanted to be compatible it had to be identical.<p>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.
Honestly their argument works for me. It truly cannot be "100% compatible" without sharing the same memory layout/contents in this case.<p>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.<p>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.
> Unfortunately for Franklin, that also meant that full compatibility comes hand and hand with trademark & copyright violations.<p>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...
How do you design Atari 2600 clones? Do you have to replicate the TIA?
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.
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.
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…<p>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.<p>0: <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1o2y2gs/multipage_ad_for_ibm_pcjr/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1o2y2gs/m...</a><p>1: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru4qPlTbJG4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru4qPlTbJG4</a><p>2: <a href="https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC35folder/IBMtramp.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC35folder/IBMt...</a>
> <i>I don’t understand why this post is so negative on Franklin. They seemed great.</i><p>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.<p>Bob Applegate's blog is also charming, but a bit difficult to navigate to find the good bits.
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.<p>Competition is great for everyone except Apple shareholders.
<i>> 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.”</i><p>Building a functional equivalent is one thing, making a direct copy in a different case is another.
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.
> 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<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.
> 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.<p>My God, such an Architecture might have become an Industry Standard!<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture</a><p>> 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.
> But Franklin Computer Corporation’s hardware, software, and ad concepts were stolen intellectual property, which, I think, qualifies as “bad.”<p>"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 <i>implying</i> 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.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.