Franklin ACE

I continued to use the Sol for several years.  Eventually, my friend Roger enticed me to buy a Franklin ACE.  This computer was a clone of the APPLE II that contained several enhancements, including the capability to handle lower-case letters.

 

 

Although the computer in the picture shows one Apple disk drive, I used two Franklin drives.  This illustrates, however, how compatible the ACE was with the Apple II. 

 

 

 

The ACE ran Apple DOS and Apple BASIC from the disk:

 

 

 

I remember taking my daughter Elizabeth, who was about two years old at the time, to Roger’s house to pick up my new computer.  One of the complaints many people had about the real Apple II is that there was a reset key on the keyboard very near the return key.  Since reset would reboot the system, it was easy to abort the program you were running by accident.  I asked Roger where the reset key was on the Franklin.  He said, “I guess they don’t have one.”  But later that evening, Elizabeth, who was short enough to see it, found the reset key:  it was on the underside of the keyboard. 

 

Roger also sold me an NEC dot-matrix printer.

 

I eventually added a Microsoft Softcard.  This was an add-on card that contained a Z80 CPU and came with a version of CP/M. 

 

 

CP/M was the first (somewhat) portable operating system for micro-computers.  I say “somewhat portable” because it only worked on 8080 CPUs.  That’s why Microsoft added the Z80 processor to the Apple II.  The Apple used a 6502 processor from MOS Technology.  The Z80 is a superset of the 8080.  CP/M consists of three main components, the BIOS (Basic I/O System), BDOS (Basic Disk Operating System) and COM (Command processor.) 

 

The BIOS provided all the low-level hardware interfaces, and had to be rewritten for each system to which CP/M was ported.  It provided a common interface from the portable components to the hardware-specifics.  Unlike the later MS-DOS BIOS, which was stored in ROM, the CP/M BIOS was loaded from disk when CP/M was booted.   Most versions of BIOS used the system-specific ROM to perform their functions.

 

The BDOS provided a simple file system for the disk and the command processor provided the user interface.

 

The BDOS and COM were portable and would run on any 8080 system for which a BIOS had been created. 

 

 

CP/M also came with a number of utilities, including an assembler, line editor, and debugger. 

 

I also bought a spreadsheet (VisiCalc—the original spreadsheet), a word processor (WordStar) and a database program (dBase II).  Of course I still use a spreadsheet and word processor, but have moved on to other brands;  I still do use dBase, now up to dBase IV.