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AppleTalk was so easy to use that ad-hoc networks tended to appear whenever multiple Macs were in the same room.
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AppleTalk and was
AppleTalk was released for the original Macintosh in 1985, and was the primary protocol used by Apple devices through the 1980s and 90s.
AppleTalk support was also available in most networked printers ( especially laser printers ), some file servers and a number of routers.
Additionally, AppleTalk was designed from the start to allow use with any potential underlying physical link.
With its release, AppleTalk Personal Network was renamed LocalTalk.
AppleTalk was at that time the most used networking system in the world, with over three times the installations of any other vendor.
A significant re-design was released in 1989 as AppleTalk Phase II.
With the purchase of NeXT and subsequent development of Mac OS X, AppleTalk was strictly a legacy system.
Support was added to OS X in order to provide support for the large number of existing AppleTalk devices, notably laser printers and file shares, but alternate connection solutions common in this era, notably USB for printers, limited their demand.
AppleTalk support was finally removed from the MacOS in Mac OS X v10. 6 in 2009.
Unlike most of the early LAN systems, AppleTalk was not built using the archetypal Xerox XNS system.
One key differentiation for AppleTalk was it contained two protocols aimed at making the system completely self-configuring.
The AppleTalk address resolution protocol ( AARP ) allowed AppleTalk hosts to automatically generate their own network addresses, and the Name Binding Protocol ( NBP ) was a dynamic system for mapping network addresses to user-readable names.
An AppleTalk address was a 4-byte quantity.
Note that, because a name translated to an address, which included a socket number as well as a node number, a name in AppleTalk mapped directly to a service being provided by a machine, which was entirely separate from the name of the machine itself.
This was a comparatively late addition to the AppleTalk protocol suite, done when it became clear that a TCP-style reliable connection-oriented transport was needed.
ATP was the original reliable transport-level protocol for AppleTalk, built on top of DDP.
At the time it was being developed, a full, reliable connection-oriented protocol like TCP was considered to be too expensive to implement for most of the intended uses of AppleTalk.
NBP was a dynamic, distributed system for managing AppleTalk names.
This was the only part of AppleTalk that required periodic unsolicited broadcasts: every 10 seconds, each router had to send out a list of all the network numbers it knew about and how far away it thought they were.
ZIP was the protocol by which AppleTalk network numbers were associated with zone names.
AppleTalk and use
These included updates to EtherTalk and TokenTalk, AppleTalk software and LocalTalk hardware for the IBM PC, EtherTalk for Apple's A / UX operating system allowing it to use LaserPrinters and other network resources, and the Mac X. 25 and MacX products.
( Some newer protocols, such as Kerberos and Active Directory use DNS SRV records to identify services by name, which is much closer to the AppleTalk model.
AFP is still in use in Mac OS X, even though most other AppleTalk protocols have been deprecated.
EIGRP can run separate routing processes for Internet Protocol ( IP ), IPv6, IPX and AppleTalk through the use of protocol-dependent modules ( PDMs ).
The LaserWriter was also the first peripheral to use the LocalTalk connector and Apple ’ s unified round AppleTalk Connector Family, which allowed any variety of mechanical networking systems to be plugged into the ports on the computers or printers.
New software drivers allowed the ImageWriter LQ to be used on AppleTalk local area networks and supports use of tabloid, or B, size paper ().
* File-sharing client — The system can only use TCP / IP, not AppleTalk, to connect to servers sharing the Apple Filing Protocol.
Many third-party AFP implementations use AFP 2. x, thereby supporting AppleTalk as a connection method.
* Columbia AppleTalk Protocol ( CAP ) was an open source implementation of AFP and AppleTalk from Columbia University that has been discontinued and has fallen out of use.
Earlier versions of AppleShare supported only the AppleTalk network transport protocol but later versions, sold under the name AppleShare IP, allowed use of the TCP / IP protocol stack, as used on most modern networks.
The Chooser allowed users to connect to AppleShare file servers ( via AppleTalk or TCP / IP ), enable or disable the network access, and select which printer to use.
AppleTalk and networks
AppleTalk included a number of features that allowed local area networks to be connected with no prior setup or the need for a centralized router or server of any sort.
PhoneNet allowed AppleTalk networks to be connected together using normal phone wires, even existing runs already being used for phones.
Apple also added its own implementation of AppleTalk to the stack to support legacy networks.
For networks without AppleTalk zones, an asterisk (*) would be substituted for the zone name.
Small networks could be set up simply by installing the standard " client " software ; the machines would discover each other on AppleTalk and communicate directly.
An MS-DOS client was added for PCs on AppleTalk networks.
AppleTalk and Macs
However, the LaserWriter featured AppleTalk support that allowed the printer to be shared among as many as sixteen Macs, meaning that its per-user price could fall to under $ 450, far less expensive than HPs less-advanced model.
Centram Systems product, called TOPS (" Transcendental Operating System "), allowed transparent file sharing among Macs, PCs, and Unix machines, using the AppleTalk protocol.
AppleTalk and were
By this point Apple had a wide variety of communications products under development, and many of these were announced along with AppleTalk Phase II.
As Apple abandoned many of these product categories, and all new systems were based on IP, AppleTalk became less and less common.
For socket numbers, a few well-known numbers were reserved for special purposes specific to the AppleTalk protocol itself.
These concepts were later adopted for the creation of the Internet Protocol ( IP ) and other ( now deprecated ) network protocols like e. g. AppleTalk or Xerox Network Systems.
Thousands of Mac programs were based on the AppleTalk protocol ; in order to support these programs, AppleTalk was re-implemented as an OpenTransport " stack ", and then re-implemented as an API shim on top of this new library.
MacTCP and the previous generation AppleTalk library were slow especially on PowerPC-based Macintoshes because they were written for previous generation 680x0-based Macintoshes and therefore ran under emulation on PowerPC-based Macintoshes.
Eventually, the LaserWriter and other printers were capable of being connected using AppleTalk, Apple's built-in networking system.
The Banyan VINES, AppleTalk, ServerNet, IPX / SPX, Giganet, and RPC Net-Libs were dropped from MDAC 2. 5 onwards.
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