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
