We thought that we better take some precautions. If they were clever enough (which Franklin wasn't), they could disguise the code (say by systematically permuting some registers) so it wouldn't look that similar at the binary level. We anticipated that someone might try a similar trick with the Macintosh someday. They eventually won, and forced Franklin to withdraw the Ace from the market.Įven though Apple won the case, it was pretty scary for a while, and it wasn't clear until the end that the judge would rule in Apple's favor - Franklin argued that they had a right to copy the Apple II ROMs, since it was just a "functional mechanism" necessary for software compatibility.
We even found a place in the manual where they forgot to change "Apple" to "Ace". They copied almost every detail of the Apple II, including all of its ROM based software and all the documentation, and sold it at a lower price than Apple. In 1980, a company called Franklin Computer produced a clone of the Apple II called the Franklin Ace, designed to run the same software.
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