PC-8000

Long after the internal engineering staff was moved off the personal computer products, Franklin decided to go into the PC-clone business by buying an off-the-shelf design (probably from Foxconn again).  It was pitiful, to put it politely.  The 8088 CPU could run at 4.77 or 8 MHz, it had two 360K floppies and either 512K or 640K of RAM.  At the time, 286 machines with megabytes of memory and 1.2 MB drives were common, and people were updating to hard drives.  I don’t know how many of these horrible machines were ordered, but I doubt many were sold.  Awful, just awful.

This is one of the few Franklin machines NOT in my collection.  Someone had one for sale at VCF East in 2016 but he ended up taking it home.

BTW, for anyone keeping count, this was the third time Franklin decided to market a PC clone.  The first time was in early 1982 which never produced anything, then the Green Lightning in 1983/1984 which also produced nothing, and then finally the PC-8000.