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

[Liam Proven]

On 13 September 2016 at 20:58, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
> On 09/13/2016 11:12 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
>
>> OK, but are we talking MacOS or Mac OS X here?
>
> As I said, Mac OS 9.2.  I'm not interested for my G3 to talk to other
> Macs--the only other one here is a Performa 6100 running OS 7.mumble.

Ah, I guess I missed that earlier. Sorry.

> But isn't that typical of the Apple Way?

What I was getting at is that it was typical of _everyone's_ way back
in the '80s.

Everyone who did a full-stack OS had their own network stack and their
own protocol, and it was supported far better than anything else.

>  Right from the start, there
> were tools and hardware for the 5150 to talk to the rest of the world.

But it had a whole choice of OSes and most of them didn't include
networking at all in the early days, AFAIK. IBM's big iron networking
wouldn't have fitted into the RAM of the original PC.

Did CP/M-86 have networking? I remember it being an expensive, fiddly
add-on for CDOS years later, and not very flexible then. I don't think
the UCSD p-System networked at all, and DOS didn't for a long time.
Only after the advent of WfWg did MS offer a free network stack for
DOS as standard, and even to this day it's not wildly enthusiastic
about TCP/IP, although it will do it. If you used Novell Netware Lite
or P2P Netware, you got IPX; Pathworks, DECnet; Farallon, AppleTalk;
etc.

All, as I said, intended to talk to some other proprietary system.
Openness? No, we haven't even heard of it.

> Apple just kept to their own little community--or did I miss the
> announcement of SDLC/SNA support for Mac?

As others have said -- yes, it existed, albeit from 3rd party tools.


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