Franklin's bad ads for Apple ][ clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
by rfarley04 on 4/10/2026, 7:33:08 PM
https://buttondown.com/suchbadtechads/archive/franklin-ace-1000/
Comments
by: rob74
> <i>Shockingly, Franklin.com, with its 85 words of unstyled HTML, still links to the latest iterations of these devices.</i><p>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 undistinguishable from it).
4/14/2026, 12:04:29 PM
by: Theodores
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.<p>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.
4/14/2026, 12:38:31 PM
by: WillAdams
For the effect this had on Apple, see:<p><a href="https://www.folklore.org/Stolen_From_Apple.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.folklore.org/Stolen_From_Apple.html</a>
4/14/2026, 10:49:04 AM
by: msla
> But Franklin Computer Corporation’s hardware, software, and ad concepts were stolen intellectual property, which, I think, qualifies as “bad.”<p>"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 <i>implying</i> 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.
4/14/2026, 12:02:08 PM
by: fortran77
I don’t understand why this post is so negative on Franklin. They seemed great.
4/14/2026, 10:55:39 AM