Page "AppleTalk" Paragraph 45

NBP was a dynamic, distributed system for managing AppleTalk names.

When a service started up on a machine, it registered a name for itself as chosen by a human administrator.

At this point, NBP provided a system for checking that no other machine had already registered the same name.

Later, when a client wanted to access that service, it used NBP to query machines to find that service.

NBP provided browseability (" what are the names of all the services available?

") as well as the ability to find a service with a particular name.

Names were human readable, containing spaces, upper and lower case letters, and including support for searching.