How to add EtherTalk Phase 1 Support to your Macintosh.

[NJRoadfan]

This is mostly for historical use and tinkering. No rational person would bother to run this protocol on their computers. Apple managed to mostly erase all traces of it once EtherTalk Phase 2 showed up in 1989.

System Requirements:
-You must be running classic networking. This will not work with Open Transport. So you are stuck with System 7.5.x as a maximum and no 1st gen PCI Power Macs (they only support OT). I have tested this with System 7.1 on Basilisk II with a Quadra 650 ROM and it worked fine.
-Install your Ethernet card's drivers. Use Apple's Network Software Installer if you have built-in or an Apple Nubus card.
-Find a copy of Asanté's "Ethertalk Installer" 5.6.1 (any 5.x version will do really). Drag the file called "EtherTalk Phase 1" into your extensions folder. Reboot.
-After reboot, open the Network control panel and select "ET Phase 1" and you are now networking like its 1988.

 

[bigmessowires]

What does it do differently from the more common EtherTalk variety?

 

[Mk.558]

There are 3 relevant versions of Inside AppleTalk. The first one is a 1986 preliminary release for developers, and mostly just covers the serial port implementation, later called LocalTalk. The second one is the 1989 "First Edition" (not marked that way though), which talks about EtherTalk (later identified as Phase I) in a single chapter (with 7 pages) and two pages in an appendix of specifications. The third one is a 1990 Second Edition which doesn't even show you what Phase I stuff looks like in comparison and only talks about Phase II. However to answer your question, this section from the Second Edition seems most relevant.

AppleTalk Phase 2
AppleTalk Phase 2, introduced in June 1989, provides compatible extensions to the AppleTalk
network system that enable it to function better in large network environments. Such
environments often include thousands of concurrently active devices and multiple concurrent
network protocols and data links. AppleTalk Phase 2 removed the restriction of a maximum of 254
concurrently active AppleTalk devices on one network. In addition, AppleTalk Phase 2 was designed
to minimize the interference of AppleTalk protocols with other non-AppleTalk devices in the same
environment.

Changes introduced with Phase 2 do not affect non-routing LocalTalk devices. In addition, none
of the higher-level protocols have changed. These include ADSP, ASP, PAP, and AFP. Only one small
enhancement (the TRel timer in exactly-once transactions can be set by the requestor) was added to
ATP. Most of the changes are to ELAP, DDP, RTMP, NBP, and ZIP. These changes need only be
implemented in routers and in EtherTalk devices (TokenTalk was introduced as a part of AppleTalk
Phase 2).

The single most important protocol change in AppleTalk Phase 2 is that a single AppleTalk
network can now be assigned more than one network number. The size of the range of network
numbers assigned to a network determines the maximum number of concurrently active AppleTalk
devices that can be supported on that network (253 devices per network number). LocalTalk
networks are assigned only a single network number, as they need support no more than 254
devices.

A key component of AppleTalk Phase 2 is the AppleTalk Internet Router product. In addition
to serving as the first router to implement the Phase 2 protocols, the AppleTalk Internet Router
allows up to eight AppleTalk networks (of any data-link type) to be interconnected. The router
software runs on a Macintosh and thus provides the familiar Macintosh user interface for router
setup and for monitoring of the internet. The router supports LocalTalk, EtherTalk, and TokenTalk
and can be extended to support other data links as they are added to the AppleTalk network
system.

Took me awhile to dig up the "First Edition". However I have not been able to identify any hardware that explicitly used Phase I EtherTalk. If it did, it would probably be a EtherTalk bridge (Apple calls it a router in certain diagrams) which bridges LocalTalk (serial), EtherTalk (10BASE-T, 10BASE-5 or 10BASE-2) or TokenTalk (IIRC usually coax, with a ring topology instead of a bus topology) networks. I believe the original Gatorbox can do that kind of routing as it has an AUI port on the back, so you could hook that up with a drop cable to whatever network you were using and then use this...

...to fiddle with the routing. Although I could and am most likely wrong, the original EtherTalk NB and EtherTalk Interface Card are probably the only models actually supported by the EtherTalk 1.2 drivers found in the AppleShare Workstation 2.0 installer disk. (KIP refers to the Kinetics Internet Protocol, which IIRC later was developed into MacIP, a way of stuffing TCP packets inside DDP packets so you can get TCP stuff over serial ports.)

Apple Internet Router is hyped up a bit on that Second Edition paragraph, but ... considering you can't use it with OT and it's picky about what OS it uses (it'll bomb 7.5) -- yeah idk. I believe I tried to use it but can't remember how it went considering that IPNetRouter exists and isn't so fussy for routing TCP traffic over DDP to macs that don't have ethernet options (i.e. 512Ke, ...pretty much everything else can use SCSI -> ethernet adapters though, Duos where you have no docks, ...).

 

[cheesestraws]

What does it do differently from the more common EtherTalk variety?

IIRC: Uses ethertypes instead of LLC/SNAP, only one network number allowed per layer 2 link. Nothing juicy unless you're a networks nerd.

However I have not been able to identify any hardware that explicitly used Phase I EtherTalk.

Many of the routing and bridging products of the time can be configured to use it. The AsanteTalk bridge, for example, do a weird probe thing to try to discover whether the Ethernet network they're attached to is Phase I or Phase II.

It's worth noting that while you're talking about bridges and routers as the same thing, they're in fact different.

Apple Internet Router is hyped up a bit on that Second Edition paragraph, but ... considering you can't use it with OT and it's picky about what OS it uses (it'll bomb 7.5) -- yeah idk. I believe I tried to use it but can't remember how it went considering that IPNetRouter exists and isn't so fussy for routing TCP traffic over DDP to macs that don't have ethernet options (i.e. 512Ke, ...pretty much everything else can use SCSI -> ethernet adapters though, Duos where you have no docks, ...).

If you want to talk about AIR or MacIP, I suggest starting another thread. EtherTalk Phase I is a specific thing and we're wandering off into irrelevant territory here.

 

[NJRoadfan]

EtherTalk Phase 1 was only on the market from around mid-1987 to mid-1989. It's main limitation was that it only supported one network number (limited to 254 devices total) and one zone name per network, just like LocalTalk. Large organizations and universities ran into this limit quickly. Apple then went back to the drawing board, created EtherTalk Phase 2 and added support for Token Ring while they were at it.

Both the Kinetics/Shiva Fastpath and Cayman GatorBox supported it for bridging LocalTalk. When Phase 2 showed up, this caused a problem because Phase 1 nodes couldn't directly talk to Phase 2 nodes even on the same physical network. So one function added to the routers was "transition bridging". Devices that hadn't had their network software updated would appear on their own Phase 1 network and the router would convert and route the packets to the Phase 2 network.

On the topic of routers. I figured out why the old Kinetics Fastpath Manager software doesn't work with Open Transport. Turns out the software has its own EtherTalk Phase 1 stack which it uses to communicate directly with a Fastpath. It bypasses whatever upper level protocol is installed on the computer and shovels packets directly in and out of the network card driver! The older pre-Fastpath 5 units had a basic built-in ROM based routing program that became active when the unit is reset. It only supported EtherTalk Phase 1-to-LocalTalk bridging.

 

[pl212]

I noticed that the Shiva EtherPort 4.1 (SE/30) and 2.6 (SE) drivers on the Mac Driver Museum also have support for both Phase I and II:


Another neat thing -- the arrows are single versus double for the two phases!



(These are Apple's icons, not Shiva's, I'm pretty sure.)

 

[Iesca]

I suppose if you have a Mac that has any screentime in a film or other project that takes place in that 2 year period prior to Phase 2 and you wanted to be ultra precise about software versioning, then Phase 1 could come in handy. I do like the differentiation in the icons!