Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict (opens in new tab)

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.

More details about the electronic bible (released in 1989):

http://pnylab.com/products/bible/main.html

Very interesting read and a neat product from a technical perspective. I'd like to know the specifics of the data structure used to compress and index the text.

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.

Yea I feel like if even one kid was introduced to the world of computing through a Franklin it justifies their existence.

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

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.

Compaq notably did this correctly.

https://wiki.softhistory.org/wiki/Compaq_BIOS

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

>Building a functional equivalent is one thing, making a direct copy in a different case is another.

Both are fine.

Also, the footer reads "© 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

<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 15 (filtered)">

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/...

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).

Please provide one example of "art" which Franklin originated.

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.

8 inch floppies! wow.

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....

who, benjamin franklin?