AppleTalk

~ the eulogy ~

appletalk was the local network of a machine i almost never saw. i grew up on IBM-compatible PCs in Turkey, the beige boxes that ran the internet cafes and the counter-strike nights, and a Macintosh was a rumor, something a design studio in Istanbul might own. so the protocol that wired those Macs together was never going to touch my life. i know it the way an engineer knows a foreign country's rail gauge, by reading, not by riding.

Apple shipped AppleTalk in 1985, and the thing that made it remarkable was how little it asked of you. plug two Macs and a LaserWriter into the same cable and they simply found one another, named themselves and started sharing files and the printer, with no server to configure and no addresses to hand out. in an era when networking a few PCs meant an afternoon of arcane setup, AppleTalk just worked, which is the reputation Apple wanted.

the early wiring was LocalTalk, running over the Mac's own serial ports, slow but nearly free since every machine already had the socket. schools and design shops strung whole offices together on it. later it learned to ride over Ethernet as EtherTalk, and for a good stretch of the late 80s and 90s AppleTalk was simply how the Mac world talked to itself and to its printers.

then TCP/IP took over everything, mine included. the internet did not care what kind of computer you had, and once every machine spoke the same protocol to reach the whole planet, a Mac-only network for a single office looked quaint. Apple saw it coming and rebuilt the good parts, the automatic discovery and the self-naming, on top of TCP/IP, and called it Bonjour. on the 28th of August 2009 Mac OS X Snow Leopard shipped with AppleTalk removed entirely. it had run for twenty-four years, which for a proprietary protocol is a long and quiet life.

~ the dossier ~

~ what replaced it ~

AppleTalk lost the protocol war and won a quieter argument. the idea that a network should configure itself, that you should be able to walk into a room and have your devices notice each other without a single setting, is now everywhere. it is how your phone finds a printer or a speaker on the wifi. Bonjour carries it under Apple's name, and the open standard, zero-configuration networking, carries it everywhere else. the protocol died. the expectation it created did not.

~ the day it died ~

there was no ceremony. Snow Leopard was mostly sold as a faster, cleaner version of the release before it, and dropping AppleTalk was a footnote in the release notes. that is usually how these go, a line item in an upgrade, a checkbox some engineer finally got to remove. a whole generation of Mac networks had already moved on years earlier. this was only the paperwork catching up.

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