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Comment by rrr_oh_man | Hacker News Reader

> AppleTalk is a discontinued proprietary suite of networking protocols developed by Apple Computer for their Macintosh computers.

Wut? Can you explain for dumb people?

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If this comparison helps: before deprecation, the last practical use for AppleTalk was file sharing, e.g. legacy Time Machine. Apple dropped it, and encourages SMB and WebDAV.

More information on that here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Filing_Protocol

Thank you, highly appreciated! Now everything makes sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleTalk was very thorough on the protocol's history, but I was really puzzled by the purpose and why somebody would re-implement a discontinued protocol.

AppleTalk is a protocol that was used on classic/vintage Macs (think: early/late 1980s, 1990s) to create local networks. The wikipedia page [0] has a good historical overview, including the parallel rise of ethernet / tcp/ip (which won).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleTalk

How does TailTalk relate to this? Does it re-implement it?

Yep, looks like it - it's a from-scratch reimplementation that you can use in your own software to talk to devices on AppleTalk networks.

Using TailTalk on my modern Mac, I can expose a file share accessible to my Macintosh Plus, which has a simulated SCSI Ethernet adapter bridged to a Pi Pico 2W's wireless connection via a BlueSCSI.

If you’re reading “Hacker” “News” either this sequence of English words should make sense to you or you should be competent enough to use a search engine and/or Wikipedia to easily learn what they mean.

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