Both Mac and Windows may lagged behind the various unixes at the time in terms of WAN technologies (such as TCP/IP), but the Mac had fantastic LAN capabilities in the form of AppleTalk. Auto-discoverability and auto-setup was a dream. Just give your Mac a name, enable sharing, and you were off and running! Anyone on the network could find your stuff and share with you. All done with human-readable names and very simple GUI tools.
There was even good cross-subnet capabilities in the form of AppleTalk "zones", although you had to have routers which could speak AppleTalk in order for it to work. But when it did work, man was it nice! Far ahead of Windows at the time, and still superior in many ways when it came to ease of use vs. the zeroconf stuff of today.
There was even good cross-subnet capabilities in the form of AppleTalk "zones", although you had to have routers which could speak AppleTalk in order for it to work. But when it did work, man was it nice! Far ahead of Windows at the time, and still superior in many ways when it came to ease of use vs. the zeroconf stuff of today.