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points by gnfargbl 9 hours ago | hide | 0 comments

> Apparently, when Steve Wozniak first got his hands on an ACE 1000-series machine, “he felt that Franklin had even copied the circuit-board layout, right down to how the chips were arranged.” 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. And while I couldn’t verify this claim anywhere else, one retro hardware forum had a comment claiming “they outright stole the Apple BIOS code, including -- bad move -- the copyright notice, itself.”

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

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.

Indeed. There was a movie about the guy who invented the intermittent windshield wiper and I remember being surprised that one question that had to be addressed by the court in the patent trial was whether a circuit design was a patentable invention.

> 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.

Exactly what I was thinking when reading the article. The author implies "the nerve of them", when they're simply providing exactly what they advertise: a 100% compatible machine.

I had one, I believe they never delivered on the color compatibility. Mine came with an easy on the eyes amber crt.

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.

To be fair, the way Woz did color on the ][ was pretty wild, but unfortunate they weren't able to properly copy that as well...

Screens were low enough resolution back then that you could look closely at the screen to see how he got the six hires colors.

They were able to get color working on the subsequent 1200 model. And I believe color was accessable via an expansion card, I didnt want to be staring at a tv at short distances so I was content to game in monochrome.

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.

> 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.

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.