G4 cube (was Re: 68K Macs with MacOS 7.5 still in production use...)

[Liam Proven]

On 13 September 2016 at 19:50, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
> But what I originally stated still holds.   Perhaps you don't have
> plain-text ftp and telnet, but you have the ssh equivalents, so at least
> you have *something* to get the job done.  Mac OS gave me nothing for
> doing standard stuff over TCP/IP connections.


OK, but are we talking MacOS or Mac OS X here?

If classic MacOS, no, probably not, but there were tons of 3rd party
tools, many of them free or shareware. In the Classic era, TCP/IP was
a bit of a bolt-on extra on MacOS -- AppleTalk was necessary for most
real networking with other Macs.

That's why MachTen and so on existed -- to make classic Mac boxes
serve up all that weird Unix Internet type stuff. Making 'em /clients/
to it was a bit easier.

Similar to TCP's status on Novell Netware 2/3/4, or early VMS, or
early IBM mini/mainframe stuff from what I've heard. Even to Windows 3
and WfWg. That was the era of proprietary protocols, and every vendor
had their own.

First, gradually, TCP/IP got added, often as a token gesture with
severe caveats and restrictions. Later versions of most of them
integrated it properly, then in subsequent versions, the
proprietary-protocol support gradually got ripped out.

In the late '80s or early-mid '90s, to me, TCP was the Unix protocol,
and since I didn't use much Unix, it was an alien outcast in a world
of AppleTalk, NetBEUI, IPX/SPX and DECnet. Most of my work involved
getting Windows to talk several of these at once so it could both talk
to other Windows boxes and to some alien kit at the same time... early
on, ideally while still having enough memory to do anything useful.

 TCP didn't figure at all until post-'96, when the WWW suddenly
started to be something people wanted. For the next 5y or so, my
networks ran NetBEUI or IPX for workstation-workstation and
workstation-server comms, and TCP just to talk to the proxy/email
server and thus to the outside world.

By the early noughties, Smoothwall came in and made Windows proxy
servers a thing of the past. Around the same time my clients started
switching to broadband, and soon, I ripped out all the proprietary
protocols. Soon after, Mac OS X did the same.

By about 2005 or so most things were pure TCP.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)