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It’s not that bad of an ad at first glance. The concept and execution pass the cavemen test: you immediately know what’s for sale and why it’s worth the money. It’s eye-catching and memorable. But Franklin Computer Corporation’s hardware, software, and ad concepts were stolen intellectual property, which, I think, qualifies as “bad.”

Franklin was focused on cloning Apple products and selling them for less, from day one. Their first computer was the ACE 100, an acronym for Apple Compatible Equipment according to nosher.net. 

A software engineer at Franklin from 1982 to 1984 who helped build these Clones, ironically named Bob Applegate, recalls that the ACE 100 was “a very close copy of the Apple ][, but the motherboard was larger and it had an off-the-shelf case. They were in a hurry to get systems to market and the wait for a custom formed case was many months.” They needed attention and they needed it quickly in order to survive an especially competitive time in desktop computer manufacturing.

First, the company generated buzz by hiring models wearing swimsuits to hand out ACE 100 brochures at Applefest 1982 in Boston, a stunt that Applegate says got the cops called on Franklin and turned into even more spotlight. 

Things were looking so good, so early, that Franklin’s founders and funders received special editions of the ACE 100 with their names etched on a front-facing gold plate before the model was unceremoniously ditched for the next one, which came out just a few months after its predecessor.

Given enough time every advertiser of computers in the 80s eventually put an actor playing a founding father in one of their campaigns. For Franklin Computers the decision feels especially problematic, though.

One of Apple’s most famous ads (a long list!) shows Benjamin Franklin designing his kite experiment on an Apple ][, two years before the copycat ACE 1000 was released. Was that ad the inspiration behind Franklin’s name and mascot? I couldn’t find any evidence of that but it feels too coincidental to ignore.

What I did find, however, is anecdotal evidence that the impersonator in Franklin Computer’s was none other than Ralph Archbold. The official Benjamin Franklin for the city of Philadelphia (and the late husband of a famous Betsy Ross impersonator!), Archbold has a storied Wikipedia resume. His face was (and in some places still is) plastered all over the city, which just so happens to sit directly across the Delaware River from Pennsauken, New Jersey – Franklin Computer’s headquarters.

Archbold sounds like the real deal and I’m sort of surprised that he didn’t push back on the misattribution of the headline quote above (printed in a British magazine long before Franklin’s Farmer’s Almanac). The ad made it to print, though, one year before the Password Modem’s similarly questionable historical reference to Benjamin Franklin in its ad.

Franklin Computers leaned so heavily on the Benjamin Franklin motif that the ACE’s user manuals claimed “The cartoon character of Ben Franklin appearing throughout this publication constitutes a trademark of Franklin Computer Corporation.” A claim that feels especially hypocritical considering just how far their copyright infringement on Apple went.

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.”

But there were a handful of minor differences. Apple’s computer could not type in lower-case at the time, while Franklin’s clone could. The ACE 1000 also had a built-in power supply and 64k of RAM while Apple’s machine did not.

 All of this and Franklin’s hardware was cheaper. “The suggested price of the Franklin 1000 is $1530 and the disk with controller is $579. However, the actual selling price in stores is much less,” a November 1982 review in Computers & Electronics claimed. “The price of the Apple ][ with comparable equipment is about $250 higher.” ACE 1000-series computers were hugely popular and Franklin employed 450 people to pump out nearly 100,000 machines in 1983 (compared to Apple’s ~650,000). Things got to the point that the clone-maker had other clones, like the Orange+ (get it?), calling their computers “Franklin ACE and Apple ][ compatible.”

Chuck Carpenter wrote in Creative Computer’s January 1983 issue that he thought “the new Apple work-alike products won't injure the Apple market, they will enhance and sustain it.” Apple disagreed and sued, losing the first case before winning an appeal in late 1983.

Poor Ralph Archbold continued to be associated with Franklin’s tarnished name and product, likely photographed in a single, pre-lawsuit session (notice the same outfit in every spread) that stretched into a year’s worth of ads down the road. Even by late 1984, ACE machines were still popping up on a desk in the original Ghostbusters movie and framed in a poster in Revenge of the Nerds.

Controversy aside, people seemed to adore Franklin’s ACE machines, especially for their longevity. “Had a Franklin Ace 1200 that worked fine from 1983 until the last time I used it in 2003,” one user commented on a vintage-computer.com thread. Over at oldcomputers.net, a different user said that in 2018 they “just got a 1200 with monitor. AMAZING computer still runs and very usable.”

But September 1983 was the last time we’d see Archbold dressed as Benjamin Franklin showing off an ACE computer.

There were several other, less-fun Franklin ads around the same time (there’s a list at the bottom of this issue) as management rushed to clear offending hardware out of the warehouse before the court-ordered deadline. But none of the spreads were as memorable or endearing as those that included Archbold.

Franklin Computer limped on with a few more Apple-compatible (but not cloned) computers, one of which you can see and read about in the 1986 Sears Christmas Wishbook Catalog. By 1988 they had abandoned desktop computers entirely and switched to a line of handheld electronics that were absolutely everywhere during the 90s.

Shockingly, Franklin.com, with its 85 words of unstyled HTML, still links to the latest iterations of these devices. They all cost hundreds of dollars despite any modern phone providing far better capabilities. Notably absent, however, is Franklin I remember most vividly: the KJ-21 handheld Bible device. 

My dad had one of these maroon-colored plastic boxes and its form factor is seared into my memory. What I did not know (or don’t remember) is that Franklin also released an MP3 player loaded with audio recordings of Johnny Cash reading passages and reflections (listen here). Because few operations, past or present, seem to grasp the importance of a good mascot as well as Franklin did.

Special note: Computer Ads from the Past by John Paul Wohlscheid has a superb rundown of the ACE 1000 that includes many of the same visuals I did. I didn’t stumble across John’s 2022  research (despite subscribing to his newsletter for the past year!) until I was almost finished with my own. There were enough distinct takeaways that I decided to send my article anyway. Please check out John’s newsletter and consider subscribing. I don’t know him personally but he does good work and comes at retro ads from a different angle than I do, if that’s what you’re into.

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