The Franklin ACE was one of the earliest commercial clones of the Apple 2 computer. Produced in 1982, the Ace100 was replaced by the Ace1000 the same year. Franklins were pretty much an exact copy of Apples design, and Franklin ceased production after losing a court battle with Apple.
I have two Franklins in my collection, and Ace 100 and an Ace 1000
The Franklin Ace 100 was donated by Chris Witkowski.
The Franklin Ace 1000s were donated by Kirk Russel and David Miller.
Click any photo to view a large high-resolution image.
The Franklin Ace 100 - Complete System.
Also shown is a Franklin labled Zenith
monitor, a Franklin Diskette drive, and an Apple diskette drive.
Ace 100 with cover off. You can see the installed cards.
Here we see the full mainboard. Although larger than an Apple2 board,
it bears a striking resemblance.
The cards in my Ace 100
From top to bottom:
16k Language card.
Serial card & Grappler printer card
Z80 (CP/M) card
Disk controller card
Eprom Programmer card
The Franklin Ace 100 owners manual. (3M PDF)
Here are the Ace 100 schematic drawing (1M PDF).
Best way to view is to print them out and piece the six pages together into a
single large sheet.
The Franklin Ace 1000 - Complete System.
Also shown are two Franklin diskette drives.
Ace 1000 with cover off. You can see the installed cards.
Looking in from the back, we can see most of the mainboard. Note the video
switch installed on the left side. This automatically switches the monitor
between the on-board 40 column video and the 80 column card.
The cards in my Ace 1000
From top to bottom:
Apple Dumpling printer card
Hayes MicroModem IIe
80 column video card
Z80 (CP/M) card
Disk controller card
The Franklin Ace 1000 documentation including the
User Reference Manual (3.4M PDF) and two versions of "Acewriter",
Franklins word processing system.
The Franklin Ace 1000 original software diskettes.
Franklin advertisements (JPG):
1 (90k),
2 (55k),
3 (105k),
4 (50k),
5 (120k).
Review - from Interface Age (450k PDF)
Confessions of a Franklin Owner - Humor from Cider (245k PDF)
The Making of a Computer - Franklin exec talks about Apple Lawsuit (350k PDF)
6502 CPU Data Sheet (2M PDF)
Grappler printer card manual (1M PDF)
Micro-Sci disk drive installation manual (5M PDF)
Franklin ROM image use with:
-- DOS Apple2 simulator
-- Windows Apple2 simulator
-- Apple2 oasis simulator
