LocalTalk on early Mac OS X?

[robin-fo]

Hi everyone

In the early days of Mac OS X, there were a few machines with hardware LocalTalk support which officially supported Mac OS X. As far as I know, Mac OS X never supported LocalTalk.

Were there any hacks which enabled LocalTalk on OS X or attempts to do this? A/UX appears to natively support LocalTalk, at least its AppleTalk stack upon which the ones of AIX and Mac OS X appear to be based.

 

[Nixontheknight]

Hi everyone

In the early days of Mac OS X, there were a few machines with hardware LocalTalk support which officially supported Mac OS X. As far as I know, Mac OS X never supported LocalTalk.

Were there any hacks which enabled LocalTalk on OS X or attempts to do this? A/UX appears to natively support LocalTalk, at least its AppleTalk stack upon which the ones of AIX and Mac OS X appear to be based.

just use an ethertalk to localtalk bridge, that might help

 

[robin-fo]

just use an ethertalk to localtalk bridge, that might help

Of course I can use a bridge or router to receive DDP packets originating from a LocalTalk network . My question however is purely academic and about true & native SCC, LLAP and AppleTalk "nonextended network" support in OS X.

 

[robin-fo]

How was LocalTalk actually integrated into A/UX? Did the stack directly communicate with the hardware or was it somehow integrated as a dedicated UNIX network interface? Could we do something similar in modern systems?

Edit: Linux appears to implement LocalTalk as Ethernet device: https://docs.kernel.org/networking/device_drivers/appletalk/cops.html