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Comment by catiopatio | Hacker News Reader

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.

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  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.

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 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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