Competition is great for everyone except Apple shareholders.
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.
Building a functional equivalent is one thing, making a direct copy in a different case is another.
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.
Here it is the Ace 1000 was greyscale only but was 80 column.
Wohlscheid - Computer Ads from the Past Unfortunately, the Franklin didn't copy the Apple's ability to display color graphics. It was limited to “shades of grey and black and white”. https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/franklins-ace-...
I got the computer with an 80 column graphics card one floppy drive and an amber monitor. It was less than a similar Apple bundle. I got mine in December 1980. I also got a disk of copy programs and a floppy with a few pirated games. Those two got me started as an early pirate video game collector. That was freshman year of high school. I grew out of video games a few years later. I did use it for word processing in college. I had a decent dot matrix printer which had a parallel interface but I chose to take floppy to a study location with a small printing lab. I would copy my file from the 5.5" to a 3.5" pro-dos formatted disc. Then open the doc in Word on a Mac and get it formatted nicer. I don't recall if Word had Auto-Format back then. And laser print my paper for a sharp look. I still keep a licensed Word on hand just for that single feature. I printed a few papers using my Franklin to Smith Corona typewriter via a cable, had an english teacher who didn't want dot matrix and that was more fun than typing manually. Whew this brought back a flood of my early tech memories.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Franklin even won the initial case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Frankl....
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).
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.
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.
WillAdams•3h ago
https://www.folklore.org/Stolen_From_Apple.html