A Global AppleTalk Network: Pushing AppleTalk Across the Internet | Hacker News Reader

A Global AppleTalk Network: Pushing AppleTalk Across the Internet

biosrhythm.com

89 pointsgoranmoomin33 comments

Wow, this brings back memories. Back in 1991, I was freshly into a cal state college in the Los Angeles area. We had access to the entire cal state AppleTalk network, which included a bunch of high schools as well. That AppleTalk zone list had hundreds of networks in it all up and down California.

Around 1992/93, I started working for a department in school that had it's own budget and lots of money. The head of the department loved Apple. I built out Mac labs and networking and had us hooked onto all of this.

It was a bit of this whole hidden world and quite fun in the pre-internet explosion days. Mind you, this was all back before Windows even had a native tcp/ip stack, so it felt even more us vs. them isolated.

>a cal state college in the Los Angeles area.

CSUN?

CSUDH. I didn't get good grades in school so that was about the only place I could go. They have a velodrome that I could train on and I got small scholarships for cycling. It turns out going there was the best thing I could possibly do for my future career in tech. Definitely not the best place to be during the riots though.

This is tons of fun, currently we're up to 16 networks with 29 machines around the world all connected together, printing, sharing files, chatting, playing Bolo and Risk, all over good old AppleTalk.

Theres definitely a bit of old-school LAN party or BBS feel to everything, checking out what fun stuff people have on their file share, leaving a note "hey I was here" etc. That excitement of "ooh I'm logging into a machine way over there!" that was lost when the World Wide Web became the norm.

I love this! Reminds me of the campus network at Harvard. Around 1994-95 we had multiple zones, but only spotty understanding of networks by most users. I had a blast one day mocking up what looked like a Mac on-screen error message which said “Sorry, this Document could not be printed,” which I then printed on randomly-chosen printers across the University. Good times!

It was a few years later, but we had some fun when we realized you could communicate with Laserjet printers and change what they said on the display.

you would go to prison for that now

You can do this with ZeroTier too, which can emulate L2 Ethernet and carry AppleTalk, IPX, and lots of other old and unusual protocols. It can be bridged to physical networks to connect old devices like this.

Well I’ve hosed my MacOS 9 machine trying to do this.

Note, it doesn’t work with Mac OS 9!

Now I get to enjoy the retro activity of getting a Mac to boot again after a botched installation…

the reasoning at the time was that the protocols are "too chatty" .. they repeat msgs for discovery and also for transaction completeness more so than the carefully built TCP/IP in the 90s.

There is nothing wrong with most of the stack, if you go back before OpenTransport (a rewrite, didn't go far, imperfect)

The reason AppleTalk was chatty was to make discovery easier. Unlike the corporate solutions, AT was peer-to-peer. Ut who are your peers? Uh, well, hmm.

That was also when networking was new, and chatty on thinnet meant lower bandwidth.

To be honest, i doubt the chatty protocols really impacted anything...except that "network administrators" didn't like the idea of packets ie: they wanted a clean wire. This might have been due to the phone company origins of networking people.

Oh, and maybe the chattiness fired up those uucp links?

The world now is totally different. Even on my home network there's tons of crosstalk.

> To be honest, i doubt the chatty protocols really impacted anything...

The "chattiness" of AppleTalk was a significant issue when it was running over a shared 115.2 kBaud serial line (LocalTalk).

no, the objection was from network administrators of very large networks aka the Internet.

At that time, TCP/IP itself was also failing to scale, so I imagine there was a lot of blame in every direction. "Heroic" efforts at cleaning up different aspects of TCP/IP and then DNS are the only reason we have a world network now.

chattyness on local networks was not awful, and you can read here how UCLA and others managed fairly large networks after Appletalk 2.0x zones were implemented.

Well, people needed to filter out AppleTalk on the WAN side. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people didn't - and those T1s were expensive.

I remember those days, and really, slow file transfer > no file transfer. OTOH I was on thinnet at the time.

And who really had 115kbps at the time? That'a dual ISDN, which was used by pretty much nobody. It's not like IPX would have been better over that link.

> And who really had 115kbps at the time?

LocalTalk LANs.

I'm moving in a few weeks and just found new homes for my stash of 30+ year old Macs, CRTs, and LaserWriters.

Now I want it all back so I can go play....

Please, can you tell me where?

I need to find a home for my 40 year old Macs (almost every model), CRTs, cables, etc.

Start here? https://computerhistory.org/

I found homes via Mastadon! I posted what I had, including pictures, and added tags like #vintageapple, #retroapple, and #retrocomputing.

YMMV depending on where you live, but I'm sure you will get some positive responses.

How about a global Corvus network? Or a global WangNet network?

Some things just died, as is the way of all flesh.

There are many, many more Macs than Wangs and Corvus systems.

The people who don't learn from the past are usually the people who aren't all that interested in learning how things work, learning the lessons people and companies made in the past, and applying those lessons to today and the future. I personally think this is neat!

Old technology can still be quite useful. I still use an ancient ImageWriter II because new printers suck, and having more options to use old hardware is always a good thing.

> The people who don't learn from the past are usually the people who aren't all that interested in learning how things work, learning the lessons people and companies made in the past, and applying those lessons to today and the future.

No, actually, I do know how things work. The problem for you is that the Internet is there now and the whole world is on it, to a first approximation.

Knowing what the Internet designers did wrong (btw, the internet-history mailing list does this subject regularly) doesn't help us much, because we're not going to be doing it again.

As for old hardware: right on. If it works, keep using it.

there's a global DECNet community still going (HECNet): http://mim.stupi.net/hecnet.htm

Not sure of the tone of this post, does the idea of a bunch of enthusiasts having fun with old computer hardware actually upset you? If so, do you feel similarly about hobbyists that tinker with things like old cars, old clocks, old musical instruments...

> does the idea of a bunch of enthusiasts having fun with old computer hardware actually upset you?

You said "hardware." I specifically gave thumbs-up to hardware. Did you not read that?

As for reinventing basic networking: no, it's not upsetting, but it IS self-limiting. The networks of the future will probably require brand-new thinking, not resurrected old stuff.

I read it all right but it is illogical ranting. You’re cool with people tinkering with hardware but any software work is out of line?

Writing software is a use for computer hardware, and people with minds broader than yours do it for pure enjoyment and exploration. The attitude expressed in your post is self-limiting.

Inappropriate generalizing. What are you, the logic police? Let it go.

What are you, the hobby police?

That's right. My hobby is keeping people like you busy. See how well it works?

Yes, I am proud to do the public service of helping troubled people see they are making senseless arguments about what other people do for fun.

I will add that you are entirely projecting your goals and values onto this project in a way that makes absolutely no sense.

The post literally ends ends with:

"But most importantly, have fun!"

You think a bunch of people who are on record as setting out to have fun are "limiting themselves" by not inventing the future of networking.

In doing so, you've invented the future bad posting.

CYBERDOG!

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