I worked at Franklin and was one an early hire. Using the Apple ROM code was an explicit choice. There was no real defined API so a lot of apps called random routines in ROM or referenced arbitrary ROM data and if it wasn’t there the app broke. Franklin’s argument was that the ROM was the API and if you wanted to be compatible it had to be identical.
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.
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.
> Unfortunately for Franklin, that also meant that full compatibility comes hand and hand with trademark & copyright violations.
Franklin eventually released a couple of clones which were compatible and had a clean BIOS (the 500 and 2000). I'm not sure about full compatibility but I never encountered anything that wouldn't run on my 500. To be fair, I got the thing in the mid nineties and only ran a few programs on it...
Right, but it took a couple tries to get the courts to understand this. The idea of "software compatibility" was completely novel to copyright judges, and there's no parallel in other creative endeavors. The closest thing I could think of would be writing in someone else's creative universe, but in that case, it's crystal clear you don't get to do that without a license[0]. The courts just decided - later on, when defendants armed with better arguments and copyright hygiene[1] showed up - that software copyright has to be thinner than other copyrights, else there is no way for the owner of a program to legally separate themselves from the software libraries, ROM code, or OS they run on.
Even then, you don't get to just say "we need this for compatibility", you have to actually find software that breaks if you do it any other way. The act of reimplementation is both reverse engineering technique as well as legal technique - you are building up a series of excuses for specific acts of copying. What Franklin did the first time around was go straight for the conclusion they wanted, which courts really, really don't like. Courts want to see your struggle.
[0] In fact, Oracle's argument against Android in Google v. Oracle hinged on their ability to make reimplementation of Java functions sound like plagiarizing Harry Potter.
[1] The words "clean room reimplementation" get thrown around all the time, but it's not strictly necessary to be clean-room. The precedent for compatible reimplementations includes Sony v. Connectix, where the latter was very much copyright-tainted and won anyway.
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.
When it started it was a scrappy startup, a handful of people. I went there because my old boss, Dave McWherter, essentially was the engineering department. Grew slowly to maybe a hundred people. Then exploded to several times that at least. At the end there were active projects for: a portable Apple II clone, a PC clone, portable CP/M machine (think Osbourne One), MSX game machine, and probably more. Way too big way too fast.
So I have to ask, who is your uncle and where did he work in Franklin?
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.
That'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.
And honestly what’s wrong with the ads? Sure, they’re a bit cheesy, but not really that much out of the ordinary for magazine ads back then. There were certainly much worse (sensational, sexiest) ones…
Let’s not forget, IBM themselves used Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” [0][1][2] in their home computer ads for quite a while back then, so this isn’t that different.
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.
From a modern context, I think it's hard to appreciate that in 1981 it wasn't clear that a computer BIOS would be copyrightable. Franklin even won the initial court case.
> 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.
My God, such an Architecture might have become an Industry Standard!
> 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.
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.
> 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'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.
I worked at Franklin and was one an early hire. Using the Apple ROM code was an explicit choice. There was no real defined API so a lot of apps called random routines in ROM or referenced arbitrary ROM data and if it wasn’t there the app broke. Franklin’s argument was that the ROM was the API and if you wanted to be compatible it had to be identical.
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.
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.
> Unfortunately for Franklin, that also meant that full compatibility comes hand and hand with trademark & copyright violations.
Franklin eventually released a couple of clones which were compatible and had a clean BIOS (the 500 and 2000). I'm not sure about full compatibility but I never encountered anything that wouldn't run on my 500. To be fair, I got the thing in the mid nineties and only ran a few programs on it...
3 replies →
How do you design Atari 2600 clones? Do you have to replicate the TIA?
2 replies →
Right, but it took a couple tries to get the courts to understand this. The idea of "software compatibility" was completely novel to copyright judges, and there's no parallel in other creative endeavors. The closest thing I could think of would be writing in someone else's creative universe, but in that case, it's crystal clear you don't get to do that without a license[0]. The courts just decided - later on, when defendants armed with better arguments and copyright hygiene[1] showed up - that software copyright has to be thinner than other copyrights, else there is no way for the owner of a program to legally separate themselves from the software libraries, ROM code, or OS they run on.
Even then, you don't get to just say "we need this for compatibility", you have to actually find software that breaks if you do it any other way. The act of reimplementation is both reverse engineering technique as well as legal technique - you are building up a series of excuses for specific acts of copying. What Franklin did the first time around was go straight for the conclusion they wanted, which courts really, really don't like. Courts want to see your struggle.
[0] In fact, Oracle's argument against Android in Google v. Oracle hinged on their ability to make reimplementation of Java functions sound like plagiarizing Harry Potter.
[1] The words "clean room reimplementation" get thrown around all the time, but it's not strictly necessary to be clean-room. The precedent for compatible reimplementations includes Sony v. Connectix, where the latter was very much copyright-tainted and won anyway.
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.
When it started it was a scrappy startup, a handful of people. I went there because my old boss, Dave McWherter, essentially was the engineering department. Grew slowly to maybe a hundred people. Then exploded to several times that at least. At the end there were active projects for: a portable Apple II clone, a PC clone, portable CP/M machine (think Osbourne One), MSX game machine, and probably more. Way too big way too fast.
So I have to ask, who is your uncle and where did he work in Franklin?
> I don’t understand why this post is so negative on Franklin. They seemed great.
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.
Same. 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.
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
Yea I feel like if even one kid was introduced to the world of computing through a Franklin it justifies their existence.
That'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.
1 reply →
They sold 100,000 of em. I bet there was more than one.
And honestly what’s wrong with the ads? Sure, they’re a bit cheesy, but not really that much out of the ordinary for magazine ads back then. There were certainly much worse (sensational, sexiest) ones…
Let’s not forget, IBM themselves used Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” [0][1][2] in their home computer ads for quite a while back then, so this isn’t that different.
0: https://old.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1o2y2gs/m...
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru4qPlTbJG4
2: https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC35folder/IBMt...
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.
From a modern context, I think it's hard to appreciate that in 1981 it wasn't clear that a computer BIOS would be copyrightable. Franklin even won the initial court case.
Compaq notably did this correctly.
https://wiki.softhistory.org/wiki/Compaq_BIOS
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
7 replies →
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.