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).
I opened “view source” in Firefox and it showed the html in a different font than usual. Maybe it's just a fallback because the page contains Chinese characters, but I was quite surprised. A small page with a lot of mysteries.
> 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.
The 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. 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.
> 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.
Never 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)
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
The 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.
Ralph 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.
That 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.
The 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.
Is 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.
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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).
https://www.folklore.org/Stolen_From_Apple.html
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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
I hope the courts will stamp out these Intellectual Property thieves quickly or they will become a real threat to computing.
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.
> This newsletter does not contain ads, ...
It most definitely contains ads since it is about ads.
* Under Construction * anyone???