Thread
I love LocalTalk
Having just successfully connected a Mac Plus running System 3.2 to a Power Mac 8500 running System 9, I have to say that LocalTalk is the best thing ever. How many other computers from 1986 had built-in networking hardware and built-in OS support for file sharing? It may not be fast, but it works, and it's on every classic Mac.
What I don't love quite so much is the Chooser. After Apple put so much thought into the user experience in the rest of the Mac OS, I don't see how they came up with the totally unintuitive Chooser. What does it choose, exactly? Somehow it combines browsing the network with selecting printer drivers. Oh well... even if it makes no sense, it still works.
What I don't love quite so much is the Chooser. After Apple put so much thought into the user experience in the rest of the Mac OS, I don't see how they came up with the totally unintuitive Chooser. What does it choose, exactly? Somehow it combines browsing the network with selecting printer drivers. Oh well... even if it makes no sense, it still works.
I could very well be mistaken but I thought the Chooser was originally there to let you choose your LocalTalk networked device to print to (LocalTalk was originally to connect printers?). After they added AppleTalk filesharing over LocalTalk networks, the AppleTalk shares got added to the Chooser.
Like I said, I could very well have it wrong there but it made sense
Like I said, I could very well have it wrong there but it made sense
Yeah, the Chooser "chose" printers first. I guess adding generic networking made sense to someone at the time, and to be sure it did stick. I don't think I ever opened the Network Browser, even when it was available as part of the OS.
You are correct. Chooser was originally called "Choose Printer" and was added when the LaserWriter came out. Prior to that time, the only printer driver Apple supplied was for the Imagewriter, the de facto Mac printer.
I think they stuck it there because network printers were already chosen through the Chooser, so it just made sense to put all of the shared devices together. It also made for a convenient place to put the radio buttons to turn AppleTalk on and off.
The Chooser never really got updated much, which was one of its problems (and also a more global problem of some elements of the classic OS). The Chooser in OS 9.2.2 isn't much different than the one from 6.0.x and does the same basic thing. It's simple and elegant, but could have done more.
(You could say the same about almost all of the DAs needing updates. Key Caps could have included a full character map option, the Scrapbook could have worked more like MultiClip, the Note Pad could have added support for files, the Calculator could have gained scientific functions, the Alarm Clock could have supported multiple alarms--oh yeah, and Microsoft solved all of those problems except Scrapbook and Alarm Clock with Windows).
I think they stuck it there because network printers were already chosen through the Chooser, so it just made sense to put all of the shared devices together. It also made for a convenient place to put the radio buttons to turn AppleTalk on and off.
The Chooser never really got updated much, which was one of its problems (and also a more global problem of some elements of the classic OS). The Chooser in OS 9.2.2 isn't much different than the one from 6.0.x and does the same basic thing. It's simple and elegant, but could have done more.
(You could say the same about almost all of the DAs needing updates. Key Caps could have included a full character map option, the Scrapbook could have worked more like MultiClip, the Note Pad could have added support for files, the Calculator could have gained scientific functions, the Alarm Clock could have supported multiple alarms--oh yeah, and Microsoft solved all of those problems except Scrapbook and Alarm Clock with Windows).
Yep, LocalTalk is a great feature. I've used it a few times to connect "new" Macs that didn't have ethernet to one that did.
I say LocalTalk is great...when it works. 
:-/ :
It has its shortcomings, especially when trying to get your Mac on the Internet or file sharing across multiple platforms.
73s de Phreakout. :rambo:
:-/ : It has its shortcomings, especially when trying to get your Mac on the Internet or file sharing across multiple platforms.
73s de Phreakout. :rambo:
It was incredibly neat when it first came out, and it's a damn shame it wasn't enough to make Macintosh Office a success. But like the floppy drive it was long overdue for replacement. I imagine Steve Jobs would have killed it and advocated Ethernet instead, had he been given a couple more years.
I've been using Macs for 18 years, and I've seen plenty of people complain about how much they hate the Chooser. While yes, it might have been dated, even in the mid 90's, I've never had a reason to complain about it.
Why does everybody consider it bad? As a ten year old it was very intitutive for me! I made networks before I even knew what a network was.
Exactly...do you remember how fun it was to try and set up a printer, or connect to a file server back in the days of Windows 3.1, or even 95? Yeah, exactly. Under the Classic Mac OS on the other hand, you simply went into the Chooser, and so long as your AppleTalk or Network control panel was set to the right port, and you had the drivers installed for all your printers, boom! It was all right there, all in one place.
- It combines two totally unrelated functions into one interface (printer selection and networking setup)
- It has a generic-sounding name that doesn't suggest either of those functions
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's unusable, but intuitive? Intuitive would have been having two different control panels named "Network" and "Printers", containing only the functions needed for each.
Back in the days of large AppleTalk networks, The Chooser was despised by network admins because of the network broadcast traffic it generated. Every time a user opens Chooser, it starts spewing out network broadcasts requesting that all laser printers or all AppleShare servers respond. No biggie these days with 10Gb network backbones. Not so cool with 250Kb localtalk and 64k WAN links.
Hard to beat (at the time, late 80s) for small offices with a handful of Macs and a couple of printers, though. More of a problem for offices which included IBM machines.
I wonder how much thought Apple gave to Ethernet and TCP/IP after seeing it at Xerox PARC and Brown University. Apparently AppleTalk was instead derived from Cambridge Ring. I suspect LocalTalk was mainly about getting networking on the cheap. Using the RS244 interface for networking was pretty ingenious in a time when hardware was expensive. Does anyone know if the Big Mac was going to have built-in Ethernet?
I wonder how much thought Apple gave to Ethernet and TCP/IP after seeing it at Xerox PARC and Brown University. Apparently AppleTalk was instead derived from Cambridge Ring. I suspect LocalTalk was mainly about getting networking on the cheap. Using the RS244 interface for networking was pretty ingenious in a time when hardware was expensive. Does anyone know if the Big Mac was going to have built-in Ethernet?
The Chooser let you choose a device which wasn't connected directly to your Apple. (Don't forget the Apple II.) It began as a LaserWriter interface, though it had been partially developed even earlier as a LAN within Apple's Fremont factory where Macs built Macs. AppleTalk was a breakthrough in that the computer did the work of establishing a connection, rather than depending on a LAN specialist to plan a network, assign addresses to each device, install special drivers, install and terminate a wiring scheme, and maintain and circulate the list of users and devices. The downside of machines discovering each other was background chatter among devices handshaking and mapping the net. The solution was breaking large AppleTalk nets into zones with routers, which isolated the chatter to the local zone. A router like the Apple Internet Router or Nuvotech TurboBridge was intelligent as opposed to a repeater like Farallon's Star Controller or Nuvotech's TurboStar.
Zones were cool. Our office had the Oh! Zone, No Parking Zone, Bone Zone, TerrysOwn Zone, and Accounting Zone (guess which users didn't care to program a router). All the local zones tied to the (back)Bone zone which also had the NetModem, file server, and the new fast LaserWriter. Now you may complain that our zone names weren't intuitive, but everybody knew No Parking was sales, Oh! was engineering, and so forth. Names did change from time to time as somebody came up with a good one.
PCs could AppleTalk using either TandyLink (which Radio Shack never let on was AppleTalk), TOPS, PC-MacLAN, or several less popular implementations, and eventually AppleTalk was included in Windows. AppleTalk's advantage over other systems of the day was easy, cheap wiring, especially using PhoneNets. Ethernet at the time required an inch-thick cable with "vampire taps" clamped to it whose transceivers required separate power supplies, complex termination, etc. at a cost of a few hundred dollars per device.
Disclosure: I was VP Engineering at Nuvotech. We did AppleTalk.
Zones were cool. Our office had the Oh! Zone, No Parking Zone, Bone Zone, TerrysOwn Zone, and Accounting Zone (guess which users didn't care to program a router). All the local zones tied to the (back)Bone zone which also had the NetModem, file server, and the new fast LaserWriter. Now you may complain that our zone names weren't intuitive, but everybody knew No Parking was sales, Oh! was engineering, and so forth. Names did change from time to time as somebody came up with a good one.
PCs could AppleTalk using either TandyLink (which Radio Shack never let on was AppleTalk), TOPS, PC-MacLAN, or several less popular implementations, and eventually AppleTalk was included in Windows. AppleTalk's advantage over other systems of the day was easy, cheap wiring, especially using PhoneNets. Ethernet at the time required an inch-thick cable with "vampire taps" clamped to it whose transceivers required separate power supplies, complex termination, etc. at a cost of a few hundred dollars per device.
Disclosure: I was VP Engineering at Nuvotech. We did AppleTalk.
How did the zones work with EtherTalk and TokenTalk, was it possible to define zones on non-LocalTalk hardware?
I'll add the Shiva routers to your list. Ethernet, modems, serial sharing, etc.
I'll add the Shiva routers to your list. Ethernet, modems, serial sharing, etc.
Pretty sure you could.
The first network I set up in my original studio apartment was PhoneNet (CompSpewSA was having a sale on Belkin PhoneNet boxes at the time). It connected a IIgs, a IIsi and an SE/30. The IIgs netbooted, verrrry slowly, off the SE/30. Pretty neat at the time.
I still have a PhoneNet segment in the house. In fact, it was easier to network the 486 games PC with a LocalTalk ISA card! A Dayna EtherTalk bridge wires it to the other Macs and fileservers on the 10Mbps segment. I still have to set up my Shiva FastPath.
I wonder if it could be possible to implement LocalTalk over a Keyspan adapter. It would be cool to put LocalTalk on a modern server, but it's probably not worth the time and headache.
If you ever saw a LocalTalk network that had multiple zones, with dozens of systems per zone, you'd know the pure evil that it was... Even with a speed-booster (LocalTalk could be externally clocked at up to 2 Mbps, about 10x as fast as the "passive" serial port clock,) it was a pain in the @$$.
For less than a dozen systems, it was usually okay, but once you got above that, it became a nightmare.
Edit: The only thing worse was a NetBEUI network. /shudder
For less than a dozen systems, it was usually okay, but once you got above that, it became a nightmare.
Edit: The only thing worse was a NetBEUI network. /shudder
Routers and bridges were available to connect LocalTalk to Ethernet and Token Ring ranging from the Shiva FastPath down to little ones like the Farallon or Dayna Mini-EtherPrint that I use to connect my LocalTalk segment to Ethernet. Routers set up separate zones for each port. Bridges like the EtherPrint have both groups in the same zone. Yes indeed, Shiva was the big noise in Apple networking. Smaller players like Nuvotech always had to test compatibility with Shiva's NetModem, NetSerial, and the big guns like the FastPath.
My big network problem right now is that Apple doesn't support AppleTalk any more.
My big network problem right now is that Apple doesn't support AppleTalk any more.
That's what I'm trying to solve with my server project. A common file and print server for both AppleTalk and TCP/IP.
The zones are created ("seeded") by a router. Zones are definitely not restricted to LocalTalk. A single ethernet LAN running AppleTalk could have many zones, with devices logically grouped into zones even though they may be sharing one physical LAN. In the case of LocalTalk, a single LocalTalk segment could only be mapped to one zone. It's been a long time since I played with it, but I'm pretty sure each LocalTalk segment on a routed AppleTalk network needed a unique network seed address (basically a number from 1-65535 for ethernet, although some numbers may have been reserved - it's been 15 years since I did this stuff for a living!). Multiple physical LocalTalk network segments could share the same zone name - as long as the underlying network addresses were unique.
This meant that the zones were purely logical groupings (e.g. by department) and did not reflect the physical network layout. One department might have Macs, servers and printers in a mixture of Ethernet, Token Ring and LocalTalk networks, but the users were completely oblivious to this and the Chooser could see them all in one big happy zone.
LocalTalk was notorious for becoming slow and nasty if there were too many devices on a single network segment. Schools frequently created single LocalTalk networks with up to 25 computers connected (usually not terminated properly / poor quality wiring / cheap copies of the Farallon PhoneNet adapters etc), then wondered why the network didn't work. For businesses, it was considered desirable to have no more than four computers on a single LocalTalk segment. If this rule was followed, LocalTalk networks could hum along very nicely indeed.
There were a few devices around for connecting lots of little LocalTalk networks to an ethernet backbone. Compatible Systems made a 1 x ethernet to 2 x LocalTalk router called an "EtherRoute TCP". I have one of these connecting my Compact Macs and Mac Portable to ethernet
There was a similar device called a "Webster MultiGate" with had 4 x LocalTalk port + 1 x ethernet. The ethernet to LocalTalk routers were fantasic, because each LocalTalk segment effectively had its own dedicated channel to servers on ethernet and traffic on one LocalTalk network did not slow down any other network segments. [Edit] I should mention that another solution was to run the software router "Apple Internet Router" on a Mac II or similar and use both printer and modem ports to run separate LocalTalk LAN segments. I recall there were also some software products to do this in the background on AppleShare file servers. You could set up a Mac as a file server and connect 2 x LocalTalk network - one to the printer port and one to the modem port. Popular with schools for low cost. We generally avoided these solutions, because they tended to break (or the software would get fiddled with!) and would need fixing. A proper hardware router, configured properly would seldom return to haunt you at a later date.A less elegant, but considerably cheaper and easier to configure solution was a device called a P-Shooter (not sure if the spelling of the name is correct). It was a dumb (i.e. not managed) device with many LocalTalk ports. The P-Shooter re-clocked and cleaned up the signals coming in from each LocalTalk port before broadcasting them to all the other ports - much like a 10Base-T ethernet hub. It did nothing for problems with traffic and saturated LocalTalk segments, but made a big difference to school networks without the expense or management overhead of a proper AppleTalk router.
So for a reliable LocalTalk network one would need a router for every four devices? How did that compare to 10base2? It would be fun for historical purposes to have a 10base2 segment, as a great deal of my Macs have BNC connectors instead of RJ45. I would have to find a bridge, though. There is a cruft room in one of the university buildings, but I would have to get keycard access, and I imagine all the 90s stuff is long gone.
This thread really takes me back to when I was a kid and I was sketching and planning networks at home. A front desk with a Tiki Z80 computer where "clients" could sign in (connected with a Shiva NetSerial, I suppose), an office with a Mac in every room, and of course a LaserWriter and a Workgroup server. Of course I never put much thought to what this supposed business would actually do, and who would work there. My first grade teacher at the time thought I was messed up in the head and sent a worried letter home when I didn't want to roll around in the mud with the other children. Maybe she was right, and I still am! :lol:
Now I have most of the hardware and my own house, but the idea of running a 1990s office doesn't seem quite as appealing any more.
This thread really takes me back to when I was a kid and I was sketching and planning networks at home. A front desk with a Tiki Z80 computer where "clients" could sign in (connected with a Shiva NetSerial, I suppose), an office with a Mac in every room, and of course a LaserWriter and a Workgroup server. Of course I never put much thought to what this supposed business would actually do, and who would work there. My first grade teacher at the time thought I was messed up in the head and sent a worried letter home when I didn't want to roll around in the mud with the other children. Maybe she was right, and I still am! :lol:
Now I have most of the hardware and my own house, but the idea of running a 1990s office doesn't seem quite as appealing any more.
The typical corporate setup that I came across consisted of a server (or servers - sometimes NetWare with Mac support) on a 10Mb ethernet backbone connected to a Webster MultiGate with 4 x LocalTalk network, each LocalTalk segment having four Macs connected. i.e. 16 LocalTalk Macs to one MultiGate. This could scale out with multiple MultiGate routers sharing the one 10Mb ethernet segment.
The LocalTalk segment speed was still 230kb, so roughly 1/40th of ethernet speed. The advantage was that each Mac user would consistently get full LocalTalk speed. File sizes were much smaller then, so it actually ran quite well by the standards of the day. The MutliGates supported Mac IP and it was common for Mac users to use NCSA Telnet to access Unix systems as well as doing file and print.
Four Macs per LocalTalk segment was just a rough rule of thumb. I've seen properly terminated LocalTalk networks run ok with light traffic and 12 devices, although that is stretching the limits in my experience. Distance wise, we once ran a LocalTalk segment from a dedicated router port to a couple of Macs in a remote building some 100m (300ft) away.
I just dug out a copy of the Farallon PhoneNet manual and it says that it is possible to have up to 26 devices daisy chained over 1800 ft. I never tried anything like 1800 feet, but I think 26 devices would be pushing it; purely because of the low bandwidth per Mac with that many machines sharing 230kb (actually 230kb, less the bandwidth taken by network broadcasts and other AppleTalk overheads). It looks like Farallon also made a device similar to the P-Shooter I mentioned in an earlier post. It was called a "StarController". Effectively it was a 12 port LocalTalk hub. I never encountered one of these in the field though.
Has anyone outside Australia come across the Webster MultiGate routers? I recall them being an Australian product, but I don't know if they were only sold locally, or if they were also popular in the US market.
I have mounted a 500GB share (Appleshare IP 6.3) using localtalk cabling on much older machines (e.g., 68030 PowerBooks) running Systems 7.1 - 7.5. Under localtalk and the standard AppleShare software that comes stock in System 7, a machine will list and work with the files on the 500GB disk. I have installed software archived on the large drive to localtalk-only machines. It is slow, I admit, but it is also all perfectly robust and a damn sight easier than making a massive set of floppies from an archive. All you do is go for a walk or a cup of coffee and when you come back the deed is done.
You need to have some sort of localtalk-ethertalk bridge running to do this (I use the Apple Internet Router for these purposes). Other than that small hitch, it couldn't be simpler.
So I like localtalk too. The ability to mount such large shares over that limited networking system amazes me every time I see it.
You need to have some sort of localtalk-ethertalk bridge running to do this (I use the Apple Internet Router for these purposes). Other than that small hitch, it couldn't be simpler.
So I like localtalk too. The ability to mount such large shares over that limited networking system amazes me every time I see it.
I finally got around to trying out LocalTalk Bridge. It's amazing!
Neither of my two compacts have ethernet and now that I have A/UX on the SE/30 I feel the need for networking. So I ran some tests with the Classic II (as it had plain ole Mac OS installed) and everything just worked. I'm running LocalTalk Bridge on my 7500 which is hooked up to my router over ethernet. I have a Linintosh VM running in VirtualBox on Windows and can access it from System 6 on the Classic II connected to the 7500 with a printer cable
So far this is just local networking, but tomorrow I'll see about getting online.
Neither of my two compacts have ethernet and now that I have A/UX on the SE/30 I feel the need for networking. So I ran some tests with the Classic II (as it had plain ole Mac OS installed) and everything just worked. I'm running LocalTalk Bridge on my 7500 which is hooked up to my router over ethernet. I have a Linintosh VM running in VirtualBox on Windows and can access it from System 6 on the Classic II connected to the 7500 with a printer cable
So far this is just local networking, but tomorrow I'll see about getting online.
Dang! Somebody actually used P-Shooters? I figured that was the most obscure gadget I ever worked on. P-Con never got beyond the 2 guys in a garage stage. Perhaps the "CEO" licensed the design to some Australian firm.
My personal record for LocalTalk was 10,000 ft of cat 2 twisted pair. We had one guy who had a single pair with a break in it under a freeway that ran through his campus. He used P-Shooters to recover the mangled data and tie the two sides of the campus together. Musta been pretty desperate. Another guy claimed to run LocalTalk from house to barn over a couple of strands of barbed wire fence. 8-o A dozen or two Macs doing occasional server access on a LocalTalk segment was pretty tolerable. For users doing publishing or multimedia work, 4 users was preferable.
My personal record for LocalTalk was 10,000 ft of cat 2 twisted pair. We had one guy who had a single pair with a break in it under a freeway that ran through his campus. He used P-Shooters to recover the mangled data and tie the two sides of the campus together. Musta been pretty desperate. Another guy claimed to run LocalTalk from house to barn over a couple of strands of barbed wire fence. 8-o A dozen or two Macs doing occasional server access on a LocalTalk segment was pretty tolerable. For users doing publishing or multimedia work, 4 users was preferable.
That's epic :lol:
Too bad token ring didn't catch on too well... in the days before switched ethernet, it was a much better LAN technology. The main thing that gets me about token ring MSAUs (the equivalent of a switch/hub) is that they don't need a power supply... they're passive devices that only need power for the port bypass relays to open, which comes from the attached device anyway. Clever design right there.
What's really interesting is that LocalTalk is actually based upon an IBM networking protocol, SDLC. If you don't believe me, the Zilog 8530 SCC had hardware-level support for it, and if this diagram from a circa 1986 IBM reference manual for SDLC doesn't describe LocalTalk, I don't know what does:
Also, SDLC supported multi-point serial links (again, just like LocalTalk), with an 8 bit address field. Ever noticed that AppleTalk's address field is 8 bits? There's your reason why.
What's really interesting is that LocalTalk is actually based upon an IBM networking protocol, SDLC. If you don't believe me, the Zilog 8530 SCC had hardware-level support for it, and if this diagram from a circa 1986 IBM reference manual for SDLC doesn't describe LocalTalk, I don't know what does:
Also, SDLC supported multi-point serial links (again, just like LocalTalk), with an 8 bit address field. Ever noticed that AppleTalk's address field is 8 bits? There's your reason why.
1984 actually. A stock, 64K ROM Mac 512K (September 1984) could be a client for file sharing with LocalTalk.
Acorn did have built-in file sharing in the early 80's, but not in GUI form.