Franklin Electronic Publishers, Incorporated (formerly Franklin Computer Corporation) is an American consumer electronics manufacturer based in Burlington, New Jersey, founded in 1981. Since the mid-1980s, it has primarily created and sold hand-held electronic references, such as spelling correctors, dictionaries, translation devices, medical references, and Bibles. It was publicly traded on the American Stock Exchange under the symbol FEP until September 30, 2009, when it merged with Saunders Acquisition Corporation.[1]
Franklin was founded in 1981 by Barry Borden, Russell Bower, and Joel Shusterman as Franklin Computer Corporation. It manufactured clones of the Apple II series computer, which it first marketed in 1982.
Franklin ACE 100
In early 1982, Franklin released the Franklin ACE 100, and in March of the same year, the Franklin ACE 1000; they were very close copies of the Apple II and Apple II Plus computers, respectively. The motherboard design is nearly identical and Franklin also copied Apple's ROMs. Two months later, Apple Computer sued Franklin for copyright violation. Franklin initially won, but ultimately lost. (See Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp..)
Franklin followed with the ACE 1200, which included two built-in 5¼" floppy drives and an ACE 80 Zilog Z80 processor card (a rebranded PCPI Appli-Card) for CP/M compatibility—a popular third-party option for the Apple II. The ACE 1200 was identical to the ACE 1000, but with the addition of dual built-in floppy drives and four expansion cards pre-installed (one of which offered color video; the ACE 1000 was monochrome).[2] At its peak workforce in 1983, Franklin employed 450 employees.[3]
In August 1983, Franklin, a computer company, faced a legal ruling against its argument that computer code, being primarily in digital form, could not be copyrighted since it did not exist in printed form. Franklin openly acknowledged that it had copied Apple's ROM and operating system code. Despite this admission, Franklin obtained an injunction that allowed it to continue selling its computers. This significant case had long-lasting effects and established important legal precedents regarding copyright and reverse engineering. Even more than 30 years after the ruling in August 1983, the case continued to be frequently cited in legal discussions.
In June 1984, Franklin filed for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the Federal Bankruptcy Act. Franklin reduced its workforce to just over 100, from a previous total of 275 employees.[3] Franklin had been planning to release the Franklin CX, a portable Apple II clone, but this release was cancelled due to the bankruptcy.[4]
Starting in October 1985, Franklin released a second-generation line of Apple II clones, consisting of the ACE 2000 series (based on the Apple IIe) and ACE 500 (based on the Apple IIc). These included more memory, as well as offering many features unique to the Apple IIe and Apple IIc, all while undercutting Apple's price. The ACE 2200 sported a detached keyboard and dual internal 5.25-inch floppy disk drives.
Franklin also released a pair of IBM PC compatible computers, the Franklin PC6000 and PC8000, during 1986–1988. Both were based on the Intel 8088 running at 4.77MHz. The PC6000 had 512K of RAM and a single floppy drive, while the PC8000 had 640K and dual drives. These matched the most common configurations of the time.
Soon after the ACE 2200's release, Apple was able to force Franklin out of the desktop computer market entirely, including its IBM-compatible PCs. As a result, the only Apple-compatible computer that remained on the market was VTech's Laser 128.
With the loss of its desktop computer business, Franklin concentrated on its handheld line, which it had introduced in 1986.
In 1987, Franklin released the Spelling Ace, which could provide spelling corrections to 80,000 English words based on technology from Proximity Technology.[5] Franklin also released its Language Master device, which included spelling correction, dictionary definitions and a thesaurus.[6][7] In 1988, Franklin acquired Proximity Technology.[8] In 1989, Franklin released an electronic version of the Bible in the King James, Revised Standard[9][10] and New International versions.[10]Johnny Cash was a spokesperson for the company,[11][12] recording Bible passages for their line of electronic Bibles.[12][13]
In 1995, Franklin launched its Bookman product line, which came with an installed database and included a slot for plugging in a second electronic book. Prices varied depending on the title. Previously, the Digital Book System (DBS) product was a player only, with two slots for electronic book cards. Franklin collaborated with Bien Logic to create educational titles for the Bookman platform.
Products
Currently FEP makes electronic versions of dictionaries, translators, tutors, puzzles, Bibles, Rolodex organizers, calculators, and books.
The company marketed its first handheld reference device, the Spelling Ace spelling corrector, in 1986.
The company also designs and licenses linguistic software to third party software application providers through its Proximity Technology Division.
The company's first product for the Asian market, the Japanese-English Electronic PageMark Dictionary, was distributed through its partner Seiko Instruments, Inc.
eBook
The eBook products are sold in BOOKMAN Book Card, digital download (Franklin Reader, Mobipocket Reader, or other file formats) formats. They also made an eBook reader called eBookMan.
Outsourced R&D
Franklin Electronic Publishers outsourced all of its R&D[14] to Hong Kong, with the last day of U.S. R&D operations being March 31, 2009.[15]
The Tandy 1000 is the first in a line of IBM PC compatible home computer systems produced by the Tandy Corporation for sale in its Radio Shack and Radio Shack Computer Center chains of stores. Introduced in 1984, the product line was aimed at providing affordable but capable systems for home computing or education, with some of its Tandy specific features like graphics, sound and joystick port making it more appealing for home use.
Wang Laboratories was a US computer company founded in 1951 by An Wang and G. Y. Chu. The company was successively headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1954–1963), Tewksbury, Massachusetts (1963–1976), and finally in Lowell, Massachusetts (1976–1997). At its peak in the 1980s, Wang Laboratories had annual revenues of US$3 billion and employed over 33,000 people. It was one of the leading companies during the time of the Massachusetts Miracle.
Kaypro Corporation was an American home and personal computer manufacturer based in Solana Beach in the 1980s. The company was founded by Non-Linear Systems (NLS) to compete with the popular Osborne 1 portable microcomputer. Kaypro produced a line of rugged, "luggable" CP/M-based computers sold with an extensive software bundle which supplanted its competitors and quickly became one of the top-selling personal computer lines of the early 1980s.
A portable computer is a computer designed to be easily moved from one place to another, as opposed to those designed to remain stationary at a single location such as desktops and workstations. These computers usually include a display and keyboard that are directly connected to the main case, all sharing a single power plug together, much like later desktop computers called all-in-ones (AIO) that integrate the system's internal components into the same case as the display. In modern usage, a portable computer usually refers to a very light and compact personal computer such as a laptop, subnotebook or handheld PC, while touchscreen-based handheld ("palmtop") devices such as tablet, phablet and smartphone are called mobile devices instead.
SuperDrive is the product name for a floppy disk drive and later an optical disc drive made and marketed by Apple Inc. The name was initially used for what Apple called their high-density floppy disk drive, and later for the internal CD and DVD drive integrated with Apple computers. Though Apple no longer manufactures computers that feature built-in SuperDrives, the name is still used when referring to Apple's external CD and DVD drive accessory (pictured).
The Mindset is an Intel 80186-based MS-DOS personal computer. It was developed by the Mindset Corporation and released in spring 1984. Unlike other IBM PC compatibles of the time, it has custom graphics hardware supporting a 320×200 resolution with 16 simultaneous colors and hardware-accelerated drawing capabilities, including a blitter, allowing it to update the screen 50 times as fast as an IBM standard color graphics adapter. The basic unit was priced at US$1,798. It is conceptually similar to the more successful Amiga released over a year later. Key engineers of both the Amiga and Mindset were ex-Atari, Inc. employees.
Visi On is a graphical user interface (GUI)-based operating environment program for IBM compatible personal computers running MS-DOS. Visi On was developed by VisiCorp. It was one of the first GUIs on a personal computer. Visi On was never popular, as it had steep minimum system requirements for its day, but it was influential in the development of later GUIs like Microsoft Windows.
Compaq's first computers' form factors were portable, also called "luggables", and then "lunchbox computers", and together constituted the Compaq Portable series. These computers measured approximately 16 inches (410 mm) deep, 8 inches (200 mm) tall, and approximately 20 inches (510 mm) wide. As the products evolved, laptops and notebooks were created offing a new level of portability that caused the market to explode.
The Catweasel is a family of enhanced floppy-disk controllers from German company Individual Computers. These controllers are designed to allow more recent computers, such as PCs, to access a wide variety of older or non-native disk formats using standard floppy drives.
Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp., 714 F.2d 1240, was the first time an appellate level court in the United States held that a computer's BIOS could be protected by copyright. As second impact, this ruling clarified that binary code, the machine readable form of software and firmware, was copyrightable too and not only the human-readable source code form of software.
Apple II clones are computers that share functionality with the Apple II series but were not created by Apple. The Apple II home computer series was frequently cloned, both in the United States and abroad, in a similar way to the IBM PC. According to some sources, more than 190 different models of Apple II clones were manufactured. Most could not be legally imported into the United States. Apple sued and sought criminal charges against clone makers in more than a dozen countries.
Applied Engineering, headquartered in Carrollton, Texas, was a leading third-party hardware vendor for the Apple II series of computers from the early 1980s until the mid-1990s.
The Sharp MZ is a series of personal computers sold in Japan and Europe by Sharp beginning in 1978.
The PowerBook 100 is a notebook-sized laptop computer designed and manufactured by Sony for Apple Computer and introduced on October 21, 1991, at the COMDEX computer expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. Priced at US$2,500 with external floppy drive, the PowerBook 100 was the low-end model of the first three simultaneously released PowerBooks. Its CPU and overall speed closely resembled those of its predecessor, the Macintosh Portable. It had a Motorola 68000 processor at 16 MHz, 2-8 megabytes (MB) of RAM, a 9-inch (23 cm) monochrome backlit liquid-crystal display (LCD) with 640 × 400 pixel resolution, and the System 7.0.1 operating system. It did not have a built-in floppy disk drive and was noted for its unique compact design that placed a trackball pointing device in front of the keyboard for ease of use.
The history of the personal computer as a mass-market consumer electronic device began with the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s. A personal computer is one intended for interactive individual use, as opposed to a mainframe computer where the end user's requests are filtered through operating staff, or a time-sharing system in which one large processor is shared by many individuals. After the development of the microprocessor, individual personal computers were low enough in cost that they eventually became affordable consumer goods. Early personal computers – generally called microcomputers – were sold often in electronic kit form and in limited numbers, and were of interest mostly to hobbyists and technicians.
The Amiga 1200, or A1200, is a personal computer in the Amiga computer family released by Commodore International, aimed at the home computer market. It was launched on October 21, 1992, at a base price of £399 in the United Kingdom and $599 in the United States.
The Macintosh External Disk Drive is the original model in a series of external 3+1⁄2-inch floppy disk drives manufactured and sold by Apple Computer exclusively for the Macintosh series of computers introduced in January 1984. Later, Apple would unify their external drives to work cross-platform between the Macintosh and Apple II product lines, dropping the name "Macintosh" from the drives. Though Apple had been producing external floppy disk drives prior to 1984, they were exclusively developed for the Apple II, III and Lisa computers using the industry standard 5+1⁄4-inch flexible disk format. The Macintosh external drives were the first to widely introduce Sony's new 3+1⁄2-inch rigid disk standard commercially and throughout their product line. Apple produced only one external 3+1⁄2-inch drive exclusively for use with the Apple II series called the Apple UniDisk 3.5.
Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single, non-technical user. These computers were a distinct market segment that typically cost much less than business, scientific, or engineering-oriented computers of the time, such as those running CP/M or the IBM PC, and were generally less powerful in terms of memory and expandability. However, a home computer often had better graphics and sound than contemporary business computers. Their most common uses were word processing, playing video games, and programming.
↑ Richard N. Ostling; Michael P. Harris (Oct 30, 1989). "Religion: High-Tech Bible". Time. Archived from the original on October 22, 2007. Retrieved 2010-05-30. This is not a new translation but a hand-held computer containing the entire scriptural text in either the King James or the Revised Standard Version.
1 2 Yianilos, Peter N. (n.d.). "The Franklin Bibles". Retrieved 2013-10-18. The Franklin KJ-21 was introduced in 1989 and marked the first publication of the Holy Bible in hand-held electronic form. This King James version was followed by a Revised Standard Edition (model RS-22), and the New International Version (NIV-20).
↑ Staff reporter (April 26, 1999). "Johnny Cash Chosen As the Voice of New E-Bibles". CMJ New Music Report. Retrieved February 4, 2015. Franklin Electronic Publishers has chosen country legend Johnny Cash to intone the Word of God. The Man in Black has been Franklin's Holy Bible spokesperson for six years...
1 2 Key, Peter (1999-07-19). "Johnny Cash recites from Bible for Franklin". Philadelphia Business Journal. Retrieved 2013-10-18. The Burlington City, N.J.-based producer of handheld electronic books and the REX organizer recently announced that it will release compact disks and cassettes of Johnny Cash reciting nearly 400 of his favorite passages from the King James Holy Bible.
↑ Nicholson, Leslie J. (2000-07-31). "E-books Fuel Firm's Recovery". The Philadelphia Inquirer. Retrieved 2013-10-18. The speaking electronic Bibles feature country music legend Johnny Cash reading aloud daily devotional passages.
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