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Comment by jdblair | Hacker News Reader

Localtalk was great, RS-422 is a low-cost long-distance serial transport, and Apple took advantage of that to build networking into the Macintosh. Our computer lab in high school used Farallon PhoneNET transceivers, which made it easy to daisy chain computers using low-cost Category 1 RJ-11 phone wiring.

In college (Miami University), our computer lab also used PhoneNET (it really simplified wiring) combined with a Cayman Gatorbox to bridge to the campus TCP/IP backbone. By modern standards, painfully slow, but in 1992 the whole university was connected over a single 56K uplink to Columbus, so we hardly noticed.

I have fond memories of playing Spectre with networked opponents over LocalTalk.

To get online from our dorm rooms or offcampus, the only option was dial-up to the university phonebank, a 2400 baud terminal. Using the LocalTalk connection from a lab was much more responsive.

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It was always some version of Phonenet (Localtalk over RJ-11 phone cabling) in my experience; I don't think I ever saw real Apple Localtalk hardware!

The Appletalk protocols were excellent for small networks. It was truly plug-and-play. From the late 1980s, if there was more than one Mac in the same building, they were probably networked together. It really was as easy as connecting a cable between them. They would auto-configure, and off you went, sharing files or playing multi-user games. This was the same era of recompiling UNIX kernels to tweak NFS buffer parameters, and when the DOS world was mired in a nightmare of TSR packet drivers and Netware servers. Very ahead of its time. I do remember the impression however, that the protocols did not scale well beyond a small LAN.

This is something worth looking into.What would a modern system built in 2023 with auto-configured everything look like?

I don't mean take Linux with some added magic - that's MacOS. I mean a full modern distributed auto-configured, plug'n'play system. Sort of a modern AS/400 meets Macintosh.

Tell more. :) What things do you want plug'n'play? Since this is HN, are you thinking stuff like server infrastructure?

It is theoretically possible to have an entire “self configured” network today, but since a network (like a computer) that is not connected to the Internet now feels completely useless. And once you have a router it can handle a bunch of the network details via dhcp.

  I do remember the impression however, that the protocols did not scale
  well beyond a small LAN.

Apple deserves a lot of credit for trying to smooth over the UX. The reality wasn't that things were very much plug and pray. I absolutely remember things grinding to a halt for instance when trying to print with more than 1 or 2 computers on the network. Unfortunately networked PCs started to become fairly popular around the time that Apple went to shit. Pretty much everything > 7.5 and < 10.4 was a hot mess with the worst being MacOS 8.x and 9.x with their instability and disk corruption issues.

Trying to integrate Apple stuff into a heterogeneous network? Ughghhghgghgh. Neither AppleTalk nor MacTCP were PPC native, so with PPCs we got OpenTransport. Compared to e.g. Trumpet on Windows, I always seemed to have problems.

We ran an entire distributed multi-building school campus on AppleTalk, with multiple labs, shared printers in every building, and at least one networked staff computer in every classroom.

We absolutely handled more than two workstations using a shared printer without issue.

OpenTransport was a lot more stable than MacTCP, but that was just the TCP/IP stack. I have no idea what you mean by AppleTalk not being available on PPCs; it absolutely was, and it wasn’t replaced by OT.

It’s always the line between “plugged in and just works” and “someone is network administrating the setup” - a complex network almost always has someone smoothing over the rough edges - I remember changing the order of protocols in various pieces of equipment so that everything would work happily together.

That was definitely true for a big complicated network setup like ours, but at the same time, I ran an AppleTalk network at home with a few computers and two shared printers, and it all really did “just work”.

We connected the two different rooms with a spare twisted pair we weren’t using for the phone, and then just used daisy-chained LocalTalk PhoneNet adapters.

  I have no idea what you mean by AppleTalk not being available on PPCs

I didn't say that. What I said was:

  Neither AppleTalk nor MacTCP were PPC native

AppleTalk an MacTCP were available on PPC macs via 68k emulation.

I seem to recall this caused one of my first exposures to Linux. I worked for a small consultancy and we set up a similar network, but with Red Hat boxes running AppleTalk to do file and print serving.

> I have fond memories of playing Spectre with networked opponents over LocalTalk.

I was in a gifted programme in primary school in the early 1990s. The teachers running it weren’t very computer-literate and expected the Macs in the classroom to only be used as a support for whatever non-computer-related intellectual activities. I got sent out of the programme back to the non-gifted classes for setting up networked Spectre and Bolo. They saw it as time-wasting gaming, but what fascinated me was that computers could be networked. I think that if I had been left to explore, I would have eventually been on the path to a computer science or IT education (and a much better salary).

I got locked out of the lan network for playing a game in high school. I don't remember which game, but I remember the teacher who ran the lab found a game stored in my directory on the fileserver. I had to beg forgiveness.

A few links to references in the above post:

PhoneNet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhoneNET

GatorBox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GatorBox

Spectre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(1991_video_game)

I had an Apple IIgs and a PowerMac G5 across the room from each other (still have the GS, but in the G5's spot sits a Mac Studio, now). To get files from the net onto the IIgs, I attached a Keyspan USB to serial adapter to the Mac, with the Mac-style miniDIN RS-422 connectors, and connected the GS to the Mac's serial port via RJ-11 using phoneNet adapters on each end. Worked great for filesharing to the GS. (I've got an ethernet card in the IIgs now, so I just FTP to the Mac (or wherever) to get files I want.)

> Localtalk was great

Over the other side of the Atlantic, Acorn had an example of parallel evolution in the form of Econet, which used the same serial protocol, but over bigger connectors (the same 5 pin DIN that you see used in DMX networks and MIDI interfaces); as with AppleTalk the goal was simplicity.

Another reason LocalTalk was brilliant, beyond zeroconfig: you could use ADB cables with it! In a pinch, if you needed to get a file from one computer to another, you'd simply detach the cable from your keyboard and use that to connect the two computers together.

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