I love LocalTalk

[bigmessowires]

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.

 

[mcdermd]

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

 

[ClassicHasClass]

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.

 

[Scott Baret]

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).

 

[protocol7]

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.

 

[phreakout]

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:

 

[BarnacleGrim]

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.

 

[LCGuy]

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.

 

[highlandcattle]

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.

 

[LCGuy]

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.

 

[bigmessowires]

Why does everybody consider it bad?

- 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.

 

[shred]

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.

 

[BarnacleGrim]

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?

 

[H3NRY]

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.

 

[BarnacleGrim]

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.

 

[Bunsen]

How many other computers from 1986 had built-in networking hardware and built-in OS support for file sharing?

Acorn Econet - 1981-1993

 

[ClassicHasClass]

was it possible to define zones on non-LocalTalk hardware?

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.

 

[BarnacleGrim]

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.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

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