alt Hacker NewsI don’t understand why this post is so negative on Franklin. They seemed great.
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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...
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.