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Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
- WillAdams 6mo agoFor the effect this had on Apple, see: https://www.folklore.org/Stolen_From_Apple.html https://www.folklore.org/Stolen_From_Apple.html
- amelius 6mo agoGood artists copy, great artists steal ...
- WillAdams 6mo agoPlease provide one example of "art" which Franklin originated.
- amelius 6mo agoI 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 6mo agoI 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 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=10295 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/3742?artist_id=10295 (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 https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5530
- bigyabai 6mo agoAnything can make the cut at MOMA. The gigantic disaster of OLPC is enshrined as "art" there too: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/155757 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/155757
- WillAdams 6mo agoIt 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 6mo agoBy those qualifications we could very well nominate a Franklin machine for exhibit.
- WillAdams 6mo agoThe OLPC had innovative features developed by the designers --- what innovative features which were not copied did the Franklin have? To turn things back to where we started, can you find one article which criticizes MOMA for including an Apple Macintosh along with its Picasso?
- bigyabai 6mo agoFor what it's worth, I consider none of the aforementioned three devices to contain any artistic value whatsoever. The Apple II is an excellent computer, but entirely unjustifiable as an art exhibit. I stand by my original statement that anything can make it's way into MOMA regardless of whether or not it's art.
- WillAdams 6mo agoYour original statement was: >I mean, if you put a Mac or MacOS in a museum next to Picasso, that would make many people cry. Yet, MOMA has both a Mac and a Picasso, and you have not provided evidence of anyone feeling negatively about it other than yourself.
- chasil 6mo agoBearing 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_knifing/ 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_Ecstasy_of_Steve_Jobs 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone
- WillAdams 6mo agoYeah, but the Apple ][ was so vital to Apple's survival/cash flow that they made a disastrous deal: https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html 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 6mo agoI don’t understand why this post is so negative on Franklin. They seemed great.
- ForHackernews 6mo agoSame. 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 6mo agoYea I feel like if even one kid was introduced to the world of computing through a Franklin it justifies their existence.
- drzaiusx11 6mo agoThey sold 100,000 of em. I bet there was more than one.
- the_af 6mo agoThat'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 6mo agoI 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.
- msla 6mo 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 6mo agoRead the article. He copied the BIOS code straight up, including the copyright notice itself. That's blatant copyright infringement.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- bjord 6mo agowho, benjamin franklin?
- titzer 6mo agoSorry, they--i.e. Franklin computer.
- alnwlsn 6mo agoThis 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._Franklin_Computer_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Frankl....
- rob74 6mo 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).
- 404mm 6mo agoMaybe it was done with MS FrontPage? I still remember that hot pile of garbage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage
- ForHackernews 6mo ago<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 15 (filtered)">
- chocochunks 6mo agoWord 15 is Office 2013 lol.
- garyrob 6mo agoIt 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/0812931432/ref=sr_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/High-Stakes-No-Prisoners-Internet/dp/...
- ctmnt 6mo agoThat is amazing. Compounded by the fact that there's a product listed as "COMING SOON JULY 2025"! This isn't an abandoned site.
- Theodores 6mo agoThe 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 6mo agoThe 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 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 6mo 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/23_Datamaster
- ern_ave 6mo ago8 inch floppies! wow.
- josh11b 6mo ago> This newsletter does not contain ads, ... It most definitely contains ads since it is about ads.
- NittLion78 6mo agoNever 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) 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 https://archive.org/details/gapa2
- WillAdams 6mo agoPossibly from Cognivox? I remember getting their voice synthesizer/recognition module for the Apple ][ at school when I was young.
- sleepybrett 6mo agoMy 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 6mo agoThat 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 6mo agoIs 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 6mo agoThe 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 6mo agoSelling 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 6mo agoRalph 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 6mo ago> 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.