In late 1982 I purchased my first ‘personal’ computer. Up to that point I had been using a variety of microcomputers and time sharing systems at school and work. My preferred home machine was an Apple II Plus computer but a fully equipped system was beyond my budget. Instead, I purchased a more affordable Franklin Ace 1000 with two 5.25 inch Lobo floppy disk drives, a disk drive controller card and a USI Pi3 amber monitor.
The Franklin Ace 1000 was an Apple II Plus clone, manufactured by Franklin Computer Corporation. The Ace 1000 came with 64K of RAM, a full upper/lowercase Keytronics auto-repeat keyboard and a big 65W power supply that contained a built-in cooling fan. Franklin copied the Apple II ROMs, so the Ace was compatible with almost all Apple II software and cards. However, it did not initially support Apple II color graphics. I later added a Videx 80 Column Display card, a Serial Interface card, a PKaso parallel printer interface card, and a C.ITOH 8510 printer.
While the Franklin Ace 1000 could boot from an Apple DOS 3.3 startup disk, it shipped with a Franklin DOS disk containing a modified version of Apple DOS that supported lowercase commands and file names. This disk also included a Franklin Diagnostics program to test the Ace 1000 RAM, EPROMs, keyboard, disk drives and graphics modes. The disk also contained a FUD utility program (similar to the Apple II FID program) to handle common disk and file tasks. Using these Franklin programs is described in the Franklin Ace 1000 User Reference Manual. The appendix of this manual contains a listing of the differences between the Apple II and Franklin Ace 1000 ROMs. The Franklin Ace Dealer Service Manual contains additional detailed technical information about the Ace 1000 motherboard, disk drives, video monitor and hardware trouble shooting.
I sold my Franklin Ace 1000 in 1984 after purchasing an Apple Macintosh computer. However, I had fond memories of this first ‘personal computer’ and when I saw an Ace 1000 advertised as ‘not working’ a few years ago, I purchased it and stored it away until I had time to determine what was wrong. It turned out that the computer itself (though quite dirty) was fine. The problem was the keyboard.
The Franklin Ace 1000 Keytronic keyboard uses capacitive foam and foil switches. The foam degrades over time and the pads no longer make contact and have to be replaced. I was able to purchase replacement pads from TexElec. The removal and replacement process is tedious (and messy – as the foam disintegrates) but in the end I had a fully functional keyboard. There is a helpful repair video on this topic available at Adrian’s Digital Basement. I found a chip puller (to remove the key caps) and a dental scaler tool (to remove the pads) very useful.
Once the keyboard was functional, I removed the ICs, cleaned the motherboard and used DeoxIT on some of the more suspect connectors. The Franklin power supply (Astec 12180) uses RIFA capacitors, which should be replaced. If the power supply fan is noisy, it can also be replaced with a modern 12v 120mm fan.
After a thorough cleaning and reassembly the Ace 1000 is fully functional. Now all I need to find is a USI Pi3 amber monitor.
In 1982 Apple successfully sued Franklin claiming copyright infringement of the Apple II ROM and the Apple II DOS operating system. The case established for the first time that code in ROM (Firmware) was protected by copyright, that machine readable code (not just source code) was protected and also that operating systems were covered by copyright. Franklin agreed to pay Apple $2.5 Million in damages. When Apple introduced the ProDOS operating system in October 1983, Franklin Ace owners discovered that Apple had added software which prevented ProDOS launching on non-Apple computers. However, software patches to defeat this protection system were soon available. Modern versions of ProDOS do not contain this restriction and do not require a patch.
Henry Lowe 