It was the year 1980 when a company, Franklin Computer, created a clone of the Apple II which they called Franklin Ace. A computer that copied almost every detail of the Apple II, sued Apple, and triggered the inclusion of a small icon that would have allowed Steve Jobs to put on a real show.
A secret and highly incriminating icon
Beyond the exterior design, Franklin Computer copied all software, including all ROMs and even documentation. The result, moreover, it was sold at a lower price than the Apple II. At one point, as Andy Hertzfeld recounts, they even discovered that somewhere in the manual they forgot to change “Apple” to “Ace”.
Despite the evidence, there was a lot of tension during the trial, as it was unclear whether the verdict would be in favor of Apple. In the end, it did, forcing Franklin to take the Ace out of the market. However, the situation clearly showed that this incident could happen again. Franklin argued during the trial that they had the right to copy the Apple II ROMs because it was merely a “working mechanism”, which was hard to refute.
If in the future someone had copied the same code making changes to some registers, which luckily Franklin didn’t, the binary result would not have looked like Apple’s, making even more difficult to prove the copying of ROMs. Given this, Steve Jobs decided to act on the issue.
“Steve decided that if a company copied the ROM from the Mac to his computer, he’d like to be able to do a demo during the trial, where he could write a few keys to an unmodified offending machine, and have a big ‘Stolen from Apple’ L “icon appears on your screen. The routines and data to run that should be embedded in our ROM in a stealthy way, so that cloners don’t know how to find or delete them.”
And this is the origin of the icon designed by Susan Kare, which, as can be seen in the image above these lines, is quite graphic, coming to show the representation of a person behind bars.
A calm period compared to the clone crisis
Although no one has copied Apple’s ROMs yet, the truth is that Steve Jobs’ idea had, in the middle of a trial, given for its own demonstration of a magic number. IFaced with this, the offending company would have remained to see that after typing 8 keys, this icon appeared would have been, without a doubt, to be framed.
The history of Apple is full of curiosities. When talking about software and its illegal copies, the idea of licensing your operating system to third parties may come to mind. An idea that arose end of 1994, when Apple signed a licensing agreement with Power Computing so that the latter can manufacture computers compatible with the Apple operating system.
The decision was made before Microsoft advanced, but the results were very different from those expected. Instead of boosting Mac sales only translated to cheaper “Mac” computers. The situation lasted until mid-1997, when Apple introduced Mac OS 8 and left System 7 behind. With the name change, the license ended.
Apple then purchased Power Computing’s Mac business for $100 million, effectively ending the Macintosh settler era. A movement, by the way, which paved the way for Steve Jobs’ return to the company.
Picture | Victoria Museum
