One of the first Apple Clones, the Franklin was in many ways superior to the Apple II+, but slightly inferior to the Apple IIe. Made by a company that historically made typewriters, It boasted 128 K of Ram, an 80 Column Card, upper and lower case character set, an improved speaker, a fan, and (with a moderate surcharge) 2 5 1/4 inch floppy drives. It ran all Apple code natively, as it to was based on the 6502. Sadly, it was only a two year run of glory before the market for 6502' era machines dried up, to be largely overtaken by the 8088 based machines, then 68000.

My first computer. Also my cousin's first computer. Sadly, I was too young and didn't know enough to really do anything on it, but that was my first encounter with DOS. Franklin computers became defunct rather quickly after the Ace 1000 because Apple sued for copyright infringement.


My cousin had a better beginning with it, and moved on to program for Volition Inc, helping to program Descent: Freespace. His biggest project before this (and one done on his own) was DMapEdit, a Doom map-editor. He now programs for a database company in the valley somewhere.

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