I built my first AppleTalk LAN, for a community organisation, back in 1991.
This organisation had five staff and three Macintoshes: two SEs and a IIci with a Macintosh Portrait Display. Plus a Personal LaserWriter NT.
I built the LAN by plugging PhoneNET adapters into all four nodes (ie the three Macs and the LaserWriter) and running phone cable from adapter to adapter.
I configured the LAN by…. Oh, wait, there was no configuration.
Each of the three Macintoshes was running System 7. So sharing files from a given computer was a matter of
Turning file-sharing on in the Sharing Setup Control Panel.
Enabling user access in the Users & Groups Control Panel.
Selecting a folder in the Finder and choosing File → Sharing….
This is a touch simplified. There are things to set at each step.
For example, as part of turning file sharing on, you need to name your computer and add an Owner Name.
And the Sharing window for a given folder requires you to set permissions as to who can see the folder’s contents and what they can do to said contents.
But all these values are set visually and require no more than the ability
to type;
to select items from pop-up menus; and
to check and un-check check-boxes.
That is, exactly the same skills required to use the computer itself.
For this, my first-ever AppleTalk LAN, things were made even simpler because, while the IIci was used by only one person (their designated designer/editor/producer-of-all-public-materials) the two SEs were not the exclusive provenance of any one staffer.
So I named the two Macs for their location in the open plan office, shared each Mac’s entire 40 MB hard drive, and allowed Everyone to See Folders, See Files and Make Changes.
On the IIci (which I named Desktop Publishing), I created a ‘drop box’ which ‘Everyone’ could write to.
Finally, I mounted each node on every other node and created aliases for each mounted node which I left on each Mac’s desktop.
There was literally no configuration of the LaserWriter NT. I plugged it into the LAN and it instantly showed up in the Chooser on every Mac in the office
And it all just worked. And it just worked for years, even as the organisation added two more Macintoshes (an SE/30 and a IIsi) in the following years. And it was so easy to setup that, while the organisation did call me in to setup the IIsi, they setup the SE/30 themselves.
(It didn’t hurt that, while all the above futzing about took several hours, I spent almost as long teaching all the staff how to use their LAN; getting them to mount the other Macs, copy files to and from one computer to another, unmount a node, print a file from every computer, and so on.)
And this was pretty much my experience with the dozens and dozens and dozens of AppleTalk-based LANs that I setup through the 1990s. Even as LocalTalk became EtherTalk, setting up AppleTalk-based LANs was always something that I could get one or two days of on-site billing out of. But never much more than that.
Because AppleTalk was self-configuring. And once you knew how to navigate Apple’s (decently simple and reasonably discoverable) end-user UI, people who (rightly) thought of themselves as non-technical, could, nonetheless, add nodes to their own LANs without anyone’s help.
Because it really was plug-and-play. And it really did just work.
So… what makes me nostalgic for AppleTalk today?
I’m enough of a Unix-head to have an opinion on eMacs vs vi (I think both editors are awful but use vi when required because, back in the day, vi would be on that Unix box in your client’s back-room you otherwise had never used before).
But I, nonetheless, had to spend way too long today trying to get peer-to-peer file-sharing going between a macOS 15.7.1 box and a Fedora Xfce 43 box.
And editing /etc/samba/smb.conf in vi is pretty much the antithesis of AppleTalk.
Which reminded me, for the first time in a while, of every single technical argument against AppleTalk that I heard back in the day (and I heard all of them, believe me) and how every single one of these arguments just annoyed me.
Because, even today, when it comes to file-sharing between computers on a LAN, there is still nothing as simple to setup and use as an AppleTalk LAN.