Comment by inferiorhuman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by inferiorhuman | Hacker News Reader

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  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.

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