Clones of the Apple II | Hacker News Reader

Clones of the Apple II

tedium.co

79 pointsjamesbowman31 comments

I still have my grandparents' Franklin Ace 1200. It's actually quite a beast for an apple II+ clone, fully loaded with 64k of RAM and two disk drives. It also comes with the fastest CP/M card available. Unfortunately, it uses the capacitive Keytronics keyboard, which was a rather tedious repair when the foam degraded after 40 years. Its serial card is too old to be compatible with the Super Serial Card, and has a bit of a funky ROM, so I had to write some custom scripts to bootstrap ADT, and hack ADT itself to support the card: https://github.com/tdaede/franklin-tools

I had an Apple ][+ clone. It wasn't a brand name one or anything, it was purchased as just a logic board with no parts. I guess you could think of it as a bootleg PCB. My dad brought it home one day and said, I'll show you how to build this and when you're done you'll have your own computer. I still have it :-).

Your dad sounds like he is/was an interesting guy. I try to build memories like that with my children.

"Surprisingly, it wasn’t a PC clone-maker that forced the question, but one making Apple II machines."

There were far more cloners than mentioned in the article. My second computer was a Apple][e clone shipped in parts from South East Asia mixed in a consignment from Rockwell Collins.

The cost, that magical $2000 dollar mark.

The parts were re-assembled and that's what I used from High School into my early Uni days until I started using PCs, punchcards and Vt100/Mainframe to learn programming. With a Z80 card, 80 Column card money was made off this machine spitting out resumes via a dot-matrix printer and a large supply of spooled paper. If I remember correctly the shell was a direct clone of the 2e chassis. The operating system was a direct clone. Most of my software was cloned and that's were I learned how to program 6502 machine language to interface with hardware. [0]

Reference

[0] Marvin L. De Jong, "Apple II Assembly Language" https://www.amazon.com/Marvin-L.De-Jong/e/B001H6SRHE/ref=dp_...

Growing up in Brazil, my first computer was an Apple II+ clone made by CCE. It looked a bit like the Franklin and had a couple interesting enhancements (like being able to switch between a more NTSC-like mode and PAL-M) over the II+.

My first actual job was programming educational games for the platform.

Apple II+, //e clones were popular machines in Brazil, with at least a dozen local manufacturers (the US-sponsored dictatorship prohibited computer imports). They were largely superseded by MSX machines at the home and PCs at the office.

I still have a Atari 2600 clone from Brazil with some very nonofficial looking multicartridges for it. Seems to be late '80s though, long after Atari stopped making them.

According to Wikipedia Atari manufactured the 2600 till 1992!

Older consoles often get used in developing countries for quite some time since they're much cheaper (typically at least one console generation longer than the US).

IIRC Microsoft only shut down Xbox 360 production very recently, because it was still selling well in South America. The Playstation 2 had a similarly long lifespan, I think production was just shut down a couple years ago.

Also the Atari 8 bit series of computers (introduced 1979) was selling in Eastern Europe well into the 90s.

They were great game machines. They had no SID, but the graphics were way ahead of what you could do with a C64.

There were Atari clones and one, from Polivox, that was licensed. The Polivox one was the black, Darth Vader model.

apple and ibm were directly responsible for the import taxes. not the other way around.

the clones by cce and others were done in clean room. so apple and ibm and texas Instrument had no legal recourse. but after brazilian clones started to sell like hot cakes in europe, they convinced the usa state department to intervine and treaten to stop importing oranges from brazil. since most generals on the dictatorship had huge orange farms they caved in. and thats is the only reason why to this day that country have 80% tax on imported electronics.

the dictatorship also gave in to demands for other markets, like telecom and tv. globo (largest tv station) was started with american capital, but after seeing the profit prospects, the generals were quick to nationalize it and cut the americans investors out.

the only thing that saved brazil in terms of technology were the "micreiros". people who would buy imported computers in Paraguay and sell them illegally in brazil. Those folks deserve a national monument!

This is incorrect.

The board layout of the Apple II+ clones, with some notable exceptions (Spectrum, Magnex and one Dismac model, IIRC), were replicas of the original. The ROMs had error messages translated, but kept original lengths. Brazilian clones were never sold in Europe (or anywhere else) and were not price-competitive anywhere except in Brazil where finished computer imports were completely forbidden.

The orange tax story appears when Unitron was seeking government approval to import components to build what was a clean-room implementation of the Mac. Generals were not involved in that - it was the first democratic government after the dictatorship that made the decision. Apple demonstrated a prototype running with Apple ROMs, which were never intended to be used in the production machines, and that was why the US government got involved.

Globo was always a private editorial group. They aligned themselves with the military government and benefited from that.

ok, it was something in between. it all happened in 1985, last year of the official dictatorship (followed by a non-elected president, because the indirectly elected one died before even being sworn in. but let's not even go in there...)

http://www.brasilwire.com/the-1980s-trade-war-between-brasil...

"No, the first Macintosh clone was the Unitron Mac 512, a unauthorized copy of the 512k “Fat Mac” produced by a Brazilian company in 1986. And it was a pretty darn impressive copy. The fallout from that effort nearly helped start a trade war between Brasil and the United States; to prevent theft of Intellectual Property, Apple and other companies lobbied Congress to hike import taxes on Brazilian goods like oranges and shoes as a response."

In the lawsuit, apple claimed it was a copy, Unitron claimed it was a cleanroom effort. What was what we will never know.

and i am messing up other CPU clones that sold in europe (and eastern europe) from brazil, that ultimately died because of the repercussion of the Unitron case. Prologica and Microdigital I think.

and Globo bootstraped its television with a investment from Time-Life in 62. It is always removed from en wikipedia, but it is mentioned on pt wikipedia. But search for the date and the two companies, and you will find tons of academic articles about that.

I know the guy who was writing the firmware. Some sources still exist, even though I couldn't find anything ROMable. It was publicly demonstrated using modified Apple ROMs though. The hardware was also subtly different, using a CAV 3.5 floppy with manual insertion/extraction instead of the CLV with assisted insertion/extraction used in the Mac.

Microdigital made Sinclair clones (ZX-81, Spectrum), one Micro Professor clone and Prologica made Sinclair (ZX-80, 81), TRS-80 (III) and Superbrain clones, but never an Apple one. I'd be surprised if any of those was exported.

This seems odd. Why would Apple and IBM want their products taxed by Brazil in response to the Brazilian clones? How did that stop the clones from being sold in Europe?

you kill the industry. keep the country stealing your high tech consumers as a third world provider of non industrial goods. brazil exports today are still oranges, soy and cattle

How does an import tax do that, though? Other countries use those to protect domestic industry from competition.

Yes, PAl or NTSC, that was a system call you would make when programming the Amiga. Not unlike to browser-detection nowadays.

I actually have always wondered what the "alternate universe" would be like if Franklin had won the case. Do you think that software patents wouldn't be abused? Do you think another kind of abuse would form in its place?

I had a Hong-Kong made II+ clone which reported itself as "V.S.C. 1203" on power up (top line of the screen, where you'd see Apple ][+ in an original).

Only meagre Google result for searches related to this:

https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/200492012/

This is apparently a digitized archive of some 1984 issue of a newspaper from Burlington, Vermont, in which a classified AD mentions an "Apple II Clone made by VSC" which might be the same manufacturer.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=uC8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA9&ots=IF...

InfoWorld 1983, full page ad by some company lists a VSC-002 Apple II clone.

The USSR had Apple II clones called "AGAT". I don't think they had been used outside "computer classes" in schools. The only original software I recall had been a Russian keywords educational programming language so I figure there had been no industrial applications intended for them.

My first computer was a Franklin Ace 1000.

Up until he died in 2005, my Dad still used it for printing address labels, and for running software he'd written in BASIC. I finally had to get rid of it when I moved house a few years back.

A high-school friend and I sold some GraFORTH animations to dealers of the MicroEngenho I [0] Apple II clone in Brasília in 1982/1983. They were crowd-pleasers and attracted lots of attention at trade shows. GraFORTH was awesome, I used it to explore math, did floating-horizon hidden-line f(x, y) plots before I knew it was a thing.

[0] https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_Microengenho_I

When our Commodore 64 died, I wanted an Apple II or clone to replace it. Instead my father bought a Commodore 128 and 1571 drive. I had my eye on an Apple IIc because I had a friend with it. Franklin Ace and Laser 128 models were available as well.

When I went to college in 1986 I bought an Amiga 1000 from Commodore with the PC Transformer 5.25 inch floppy drive. It had the C64 and Apple II emulators but for college I focused on DOS and the PC emulator.

I did ERP (Fact ERP from New Zealand company Fact, later acquired by Geac and then Infor) implementation at VTech at the end of the 80's at their HQ in Taipo district in Hongkong. Later bought a Laser 128 from them to play with. Had always wanted an Apple II after learning to code BASIC on one at high-school in late 70s. Great memories reading this article.

Don't forget the Bell & Howell Apple ][, the "Darth Vader" model:

http://shrineofapple.com/blog/2011/11/15/apple-ii-plus-bh/

Which is explicitly mentioned in the article along with a link to someone's YouTube video of theirs, in high-contrast white on red text.

Before the big Apple IIe order, my high school bought one of the Franklins. For all the trouble, they didn't any money if time counted. It glitched a lot.

It would have been an interesting history, if instead of cancelling the II line, Apple had kept shrinking it and reducing its price.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apple_II_clones

They forgot to mention:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT_2020

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