Early Appletalk; was Re: Interconnecting classic computers

[Earl D. Baugh Jr.]

>> I guess there's nothing quite like the not invented here syndrome.
>
> Certainly some of that, but more in Appletalk v2 and than original
> Appletalk.  To my mind the original appletalk was simple and elegant  
> - a
> good fit for the system...

At a company I worked at we looked at Ethernet at the time, and it  
simply was
way too pricey compared to AppleTalk at the time.   Phone wire was  
cheap,
and the office spaces we had were already wired up for two phone  
jacks, so
it simply was a matter of isolating the punch down blocks for which  
jacks to use.
(Luckily the folks who wired up the spaces put all the even numbered  
jacks
on the same blocks, odds on the others... )  For the cost of one  
ethernet card
(for the one machine we had that actually could take one) we wired up  
two
offices, probably a couple hundred machines.  (Mostly Mac's of course...
but ultimately a few Caymen Gator boxes to bridge to the small ethernet
segments that supported our Sun boxes...which had ethernet built in..)
It was chatty, protocol wise, but a very cost effective way to network  
things
at the time...

I've actually got a NEW in the box  Farallon PhoneNet (which was yet  
another name for it..)
Star Controller sitting here.  (I tried to sell it on EBay recently  
but apparently nobody has any
of these networks that I can find. )   It's about to go into the  
recycler pile...
(if someone is interested, drop me a line...)


Earl