It was always some version of Phonenet (Localtalk over RJ-11 phone cabling) in my experience; I don't think I ever saw real Apple Localtalk hardware!
The Appletalk protocols were excellent for small networks. It was truly plug-and-play. From the late 1980s, if there was more than one Mac in the same building, they were probably networked together. It really was as easy as connecting a cable between them. They would auto-configure, and off you went, sharing files or playing multi-user games. This was the same era of recompiling UNIX kernels to tweak NFS buffer parameters, and when the DOS world was mired in a nightmare of TSR packet drivers and Netware servers. Very ahead of its time. I do remember the impression however, that the protocols did not scale well beyond a small LAN.
This is something worth looking into.What would a modern system built in 2023 with auto-configured everything look like?
I don't mean take Linux with some added magic - that's MacOS. I mean a full modern distributed auto-configured, plug'n'play system. Sort of a modern AS/400 meets Macintosh.
It is theoretically possible to have an entire “self configured” network today, but since a network (like a computer) that is not connected to the Internet now feels completely useless. And once you have a router it can handle a bunch of the network details via dhcp.
I do remember the impression however, that the protocols did not scale
well beyond a small LAN.
Apple deserves a lot of credit for trying to smooth over the UX. The reality wasn't that things were very much plug and pray. I absolutely remember things grinding to a halt for instance when trying to print with more than 1 or 2 computers on the network. Unfortunately networked PCs started to become fairly popular around the time that Apple went to shit. Pretty much everything > 7.5 and < 10.4 was a hot mess with the worst being MacOS 8.x and 9.x with their instability and disk corruption issues.
Trying to integrate Apple stuff into a heterogeneous network? Ughghhghgghgh. Neither AppleTalk nor MacTCP were PPC native, so with PPCs we got OpenTransport. Compared to e.g. Trumpet on Windows, I always seemed to have problems.
We ran an entire distributed multi-building school campus on AppleTalk, with multiple labs, shared printers in every building, and at least one networked staff computer in every classroom.
We absolutely handled more than two workstations using a shared printer without issue.
OpenTransport was a lot more stable than MacTCP, but that was just the TCP/IP stack. I have no idea what you mean by AppleTalk not being available on PPCs; it absolutely was, and it wasn’t replaced by OT.
It’s always the line between “plugged in and just works” and “someone is network administrating the setup” - a complex network almost always has someone smoothing over the rough edges - I remember changing the order of protocols in various pieces of equipment so that everything would work happily together.
That was definitely true for a big complicated network setup like ours, but at the same time, I ran an AppleTalk network at home with a few computers and two shared printers, and it all really did “just work”.
We connected the two different rooms with a spare twisted pair we weren’t using for the phone, and then just used daisy-chained LocalTalk PhoneNet adapters.
I seem to recall this caused one of my first exposures to Linux. I worked for a small consultancy and we set up a similar network, but with Red Hat boxes running AppleTalk to do file and print serving.
The Appletalk protocols were excellent for small networks. It was truly plug-and-play. From the late 1980s, if there was more than one Mac in the same building, they were probably networked together. It really was as easy as connecting a cable between them. They would auto-configure, and off you went, sharing files or playing multi-user games. This was the same era of recompiling UNIX kernels to tweak NFS buffer parameters, and when the DOS world was mired in a nightmare of TSR packet drivers and Netware servers. Very ahead of its time. I do remember the impression however, that the protocols did not scale well beyond a small LAN.