[LINK] Jobs the Worlds "Doability" Marketeer. Was Jobs - not all bad

[Frank O'Connor]

AppleTalk ... Yeah. With the most inefficient packet structure since ATM, little or no scalability in a network sense, the most primitive suite of networking utilities I've ever seen, and utter incompatibility with any other networking standard. Sorry, I tell a lie ... Late in the piece Apple did manage to tunnel AppleTalk packets inside TCP wrappers ... But that was a kludge that they needed to say that AppleTalk worked on the Internet.

As you say ... Non geeks could manage very small AppleTalk networks (usually they were to be found in primary and secondary schools) ... But get over a dozen Macs and problems started to appear big time. The maximum carriable bandwidth was laughable ... Even for networks back then ... And subnetting, addressing and other issues occurred with monotonous regularity. Factor in the fact that only Apple sold the 'routers' ... And I use the term loosely .. and you were buying trouble if you were looking at network expansion Dow the road.
 

Sent from my iPad

On 13/10/2011, at 5:04 PM, Fernando Cassia <fcassia at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 01:53, Tom Koltai <tomk at unwired.com.au> wrote:
>> What Apple did introduce was the layman non-geek "do-ability" (just plug
>> it in and it works.)
> 
> Wasn´t that AppleTalk, the networking protocol that only Macs used?
> 
>> In that regard, Non-geeks could manage complex 8-12 machine networks
>> whereas the equivalent in an IBM network needed a 3270 Hub, four hundred
>> miles of cabling with a Compsci degree and an IBM apprenticeship.
> 
> Well, I don´t know what year you´re talking about, but peer-to-peer
> networking (for file and print sharing) worked quite well using the
> Netbios protocol (pure Netbios aka Netbeui, that means no tcp-ip layer
> below, it was a non-routeable protocol, only useful for workgroups),
> and IBM Lan Manager (or Microsoft Lan Manager, which even featured a
> client for ms-dos).
> 
> You simply entered
> 
> NET VIEW \\machinename
> 
> and you saw the list of shared drives or printers it had available for
> network use.
> 
> What you did need to know was your "workgroup name".
> 
> It was very fast. (I remember faster than NFS, which is what most
> unixes used at the time).
> 
> But perhaps we´re talking about different year ranges... it´s all
> blurry for me, but I think it was 1990 or 1991, around the time of Win
> 3.1, DR-DOS 6 vs MS-DOS 5, etc or thereabouts.
> 
> Just my $0.02
> FC
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Link mailing list
> Link at mailman.anu.edu.au
> http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link