Appletalk

Additionally, AppleTalk was designed from the start to allow use with any potential underlying physical link.sfn The main advantage of AppleTalk was that it was completely maintenance-free.

Apple introduced the AppleTalk PC Card in early 1987, allowing PCs to join AppleTalk networks and print to LaserWriter printers.

Appletalk AppleTalk was a proprietary suite of networking protocols developed by Apple Inc. in 1985 for Apple Macintosh computers.

AppleTalk Data Stream Protocol This was a comparatively late addition to the AppleTalk protocol suite, done when it became clear that a TCP -style reliable connection-oriented transport was needed.

PhoneNet allowed AppleTalk networks to be connected together using normal telephone wires, and with very little extra work, could run analog phones and AppleTalk on a single four-conductor phone cable.

The AppleTalk address resolution protocol (AARP) allowed AppleTalk hosts to automatically generate their own network addresses, and the Name Binding Protocol (NBP) was a dynamic system for mapping network addresses to user-readable names.

Additionally, the entire networking stack required only about 6 kB of RAM, allowing it to run on any Mac.sfn The relatively slow speed of AppleTalk allowed further reductions in cost.

Addressing An AppleTalk address was a 4-byte quantity.

AFP is still in use in Mac OS X, even though most other AppleTalk protocols have been deprecated.

AppleTalk included features that allowed local area networks to be established ad hoc without the requirement for a centralized router or server.

AppleTalk includes a number of features that allow local area networks to be connected with no prior setup or the need for a centralized router or server of any sort.

AppleTalk's DDP corresponds closely to the Network layer of the Open Systems Interconnection ( OSI ) communication model.

AppleTalk Session Protocol ASP was an intermediate protocol, built on top of ATP, which in turn was the foundation of AFP.

AppleTalk used XNS-like routing, but had incompatible addresses using shorter numbers.

AppleTalk was so easy to use that ad-hoc networks tended to appear whenever multiple Macs were in the same room.

As Apple abandoned many of these product categories, and all new systems were based on IP, AppleTalk became less and less common.

As NBP names translated to an address, which included a socket number as well as a node number, a name in AppleTalk mapped directly to a service being provided by a machine, which was entirely separate from the name of the machine itself.

Design legacy The LocalTalk connector had the distinction of being the first to use Apple's unified AppleTalk Connector Family design, created by Brad Bissell of Frogdesign using Rick Meadows' Apple Icon Family designs.

DLC and AppleTalk network protocols are removed.

GroupLogic continues to bundle its AppleTalk protocol with its ExtremeZ-IP server software for Macintosh-Windows integration which supports Windows 2008 Server and Windows Vista as well prior versions.