Technology @lemmy.world videodrome @lemmy.capebreton.social 1y ago

The End of AppleTalk - August 28th, 2009

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.capebreton.social/post/392224

With the release of Mac OS X 10.6, "Snow Leopard," Apple discontinued its support for the AppleTalk local area networking system. Introduced in 1985 as a quick way to connect Apple computers and peripherals to each other, AppleTalk was a low-cost, medium performance network, perfect for homes and many offices.

The basic AppleTalk hardware was built into every Mac computer so networks could be established without any prior setup or need for a centralized router or server. Apple Talk networks could also be connected to each other, forming internets, or use a variety of physical media like Ethernet, Token Ring or Apple’s own LocalTalk.

AppleTalk was ultimately displaced by TCP/IP-based systems, but for most of the 1980s and ‘90s was Apple's main networking technology.

8 comments

For those not clear, AppleTalk was created at a time where there was no universal standard in networking. The "standard network" you think of today, a bunch of computers plugged into a router, existed but wasn't the de-facto setup. There was still experimentation going on.

Apple ported some of the AppleTalk features, such as Network Discovery, into Bonjour which was introduced in 2002. Once that became mature, there was no reason to keep AppleTalk around.
Funny. It’s still supported in macOS despite all this. AFP shares work just fine in Sonoma.
- I think you’re confusing AppleTalk with AppleShare. AFP runs fine over TCP/IP and has since way back in the System 6 days.
  
  Oh yeah, you’re right. I think AP predates me 😅
Good riddance.
Funny how they are maintaining such useless features then ditching ones millions use in their other products.
- Huh? AppleTalk was, according to the headline, discontinued in 2009 if that’s the useless feature you mean. It wasn’t useless before that, but eventually TCP/IP overtook it and it was no longer practical to run two networking stacks side by side. It is very similar to Microsoft’s extensive use of IPX/SPX up through Windows XP (IIRC XP was the last to include it).
  
  Apple certainly has its flaws, including a bug I reported many years ago in Photos that makes it useless to me, but them discontinuing an aging network protocol nearly 25 years ago seems like a weird thing for you to be upset about, so maybe I misunderstood your post.
- I mean, AppleTalk would be a pretty good contender to TCP/IP if it wasn’t proprietary.

8 comments