alt Hacker NewsYea I feel like if even one kid was introduced to the world of computing through a Franklin it justifies their existence.
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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.
They sold 100,000 of em. I bet there was more than one.