Hacker News: dwgumby

New comment by dwgumby in "Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict"

dwgumby — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:26:28 +0000

When it started it was a scrappy startup, a handful of people. I went there because my old boss, Dave McWherter, essentially was the engineering department. Grew slowly to maybe a hundred people. Then exploded to several times that at least. At the end there were active projects for: a portable Apple II clone, a PC clone, portable CP/M machine (think Osbourne One), MSX game machine, and probably more. Way too big way too fast.

So I have to ask, who is your uncle and where did he work in Franklin?

New comment by dwgumby in "Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict"

dwgumby — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 11:49:06 +0000

> Reviewers were even able to pull cards out of an Apple ][ motherboard, plug them into an ACE machine, and they’d work without any other modifications

Which was kind of the point? If I remember correctly Woz had patents related to the video generation hardware which Franklin did change to try to avoid infringing but I can’t remember if the court agreed that it did it successfully.

New comment by dwgumby in "Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict"

dwgumby — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 11:44:21 +0000

I worked at Franklin and was one an early hire. Using the Apple ROM code was an explicit choice. There was no real defined API so a lot of apps called random routines in ROM or referenced arbitrary ROM data and if it wasn’t there the app broke. Franklin’s argument was that the ROM was the API and if you wanted to be compatible it had to be identical.

Court didn’t agree, probably rightfully so. But Franklin was a fun place to work. It survived for years after the court decision and pivoted to making handheld gadgets. Their electronic Bible was apparently really popular in some circles.

New comment by dwgumby in "MilliForth-6502: The smallest Forth real programming language for 6502"

dwgumby — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 20:34:56 +0000

You're right, I forgot the indirection. Inner Interpreter instruction is actually: JMP [,y++]

New comment by dwgumby in "MilliForth-6502: The smallest Forth real programming language for 6502"

dwgumby — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 18:40:49 +0000

Was playing with a 6809 system not long ago and, yeah, FORTH maps really nicely to it. S reg = parameter stack, U reg = return stack, Y reg = interpreter pointer. Inner interpreter is a single two byte instruction (jmp ,y++).

I'd always wanted to play with the 6809 and it really is a slick little 8 bit cpu.