Re: Apple II clones?

[cheer@i.hate.spam (Christopher D. Heer)]

It was 8 Mar 1997 06:41:00 GMT.  I was reading instead of working.  And P Dueck 
<noemail@no.email.edu> said:

>I have a question.....

>Which companies cloned the Apple II (any given model of II) ?

>I am aware of 'Laser' and 'Franklin'....were there any others?

I remember the Orange. . . and the Bell and Howell, but of course that wasn't a 
clone so much as a licensed OEM'd II.

>What models were released by Laser, Franklin, etc. that were "II clones"?

The original Franklin was the ACE 100.  I don't think they sold too many.  It 
was a ][+ clone but did not do colour without an add-on colour card.

It was replaced with the ACE 1000.  The ACE 1000 was also a ][+ clone, but 
included colour support.  It had 64K of memory and did not require a language 
card.  It supported upper and lower case.  It had a built-in numeric keypad and 
a few other extra keys (Break, Pause).  Nice, solid machine.  The ACE 10 disk 
drive was almost totally identical to a Disk ][.

Another model selling at the same time was the ACE 1200.  It was aimed at being 
a business machine.  It came with two disk drives "built in" (the bottom of the 
CPU was the same as the ACE 1000's but the case top was modified with a housing 
to hold both drives) and a CP/M card.  On both the 1000 and 1200, if you 
pressed Ctrl-Pause, it turned the numeric keypad into the Wordstar diamond 
navigation keys.

Neither of them had the newer //e keys like the up and down arrows, Delete, or 
the Open-Apple and Closed-Apple keys.  But as all of us Franklin owners knew, 
these could be duplicated (up and down arrow were just ctrl-key combinations, 
OA and CA were the joystick buttons, and Delete could be emulated with 
Ctrl-Backspace).

Franklin was later sued by Apple, and had to remove both machines from the 
market.  They later introduced an ACE 2000, which was black and sort of PC-ish 
looking (detached keyboard, two half-height drives installed in the CPU box, a 
matching monitor with tilt&swivel base, and the keyboard layout looked a LOT 
like a PC keyboard, even so far as to have an Alt key).  The popular rumour was 
that it wasn't as compatible as the old 1000 (which was completely compatible; 
the only thing that wouldn't run on it without modification was ProDOS), but I 
have no hands-on with the 2000.  It disappeared in pretty short order, and now 
all Franklin makes is little pocket spellers and so forth.  :)
-- 
          Christopher D. Heer - cheer at us dot oracle dot com
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