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A comment on Franklin's bad ads for Apple ][ clones and the beloved impersonator they depict.

Re:Franklin's bad ads for Apple ][ clones and the beloved im... by rob74 on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @08:04AM (#47764516)
> Shockingly, Franklin.com, with its 85 words of unstyled HTML, still links to the latest iterations of these devices.

If you look at the source code of this page, you'll be even more shocked: looks like it's simply a MS Word document saved as HTML, it's overly complicated and contains lots of "Mso*" classes. And no, it's not unstyled either, it's just that on computers that don't have Times New Roman installed, the browser falls back to the same serif font that is used for unstyled text (and if you have it installed, it's probably the default serif font or undistinguishable from it).

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Re:Franklin's bad ads for Apple ][ clones and the beloved im... by 404mm on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @08:28AM (#47764748)
Maybe it was done with MS FrontPage? I still remember that hot pile of garbage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage
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Re:Franklin's bad ads for Apple ][ clones and the beloved im... by ForHackernews on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @08:31AM (#47764797)
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 15 (filtered)">
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Re:Franklin's bad ads for Apple ][ clones and the beloved im... by chocochunks on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @12:28PM (#47767773)
Word 15 is Office 2013 lol.
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Re:Franklin's bad ads for Apple ][ clones and the beloved im... by garyrob on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @03:22PM (#47770194)
It may have been, I never used it, but it was also a very early, innovative (at the time) product made by a company called Vermeer.

There is a truly fascinating, and even inspiring, book about the company and the sale of FrontPage to Microsoft: https://www.amazon.com/High-Stakes-No-Prisoners-Internet/dp/...

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Re:Franklin's bad ads for Apple ][ clones and the beloved im... by ctmnt on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @09:31AM (#47765428)
That is amazing. Compounded by the fact that there's a product listed as "COMING SOON JULY 2025"! This isn't an abandoned site.
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Re:Franklin's bad ads for Apple ][ clones and the beloved im... by fauria on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @11:17AM (#47766780)
Also, the footer reads "© 2026 FEP Holding Company LLC" (probably not automated, the web seems like an HTML exported Word document).

Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Electronic_Publishers

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Re:Franklin's bad ads for Apple ][ clones and the beloved im... by celsoazevedo on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @11:49AM (#47767228)
That part uses javascript to get the year: https://celsoazevedo.com/files/2026/franklin-date.png

The "Last-Modified" HTML header suggests it was last updated on "Sat, 05 Jul 2025 04:27:21 GMT": https://celsoazevedo.com/files/2026/franklin-mod.png

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Re:Franklin's bad ads for Apple ][ clones and the beloved im... by alberto-m on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @05:49PM (#47771943)
I opened “view source” in Firefox and it showed the html in a different font than usual. Maybe it's just a fallback because the page contains Chinese characters, but I was quite surprised. A small page with a lot of mysteries.
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