Understanding the Network: A Practical Guide to Internetworking

AppleTalk

AppleTalk was an outgrowth of the Apple Macintosh computing platform. First introduced in 1984 and updated in 1989, it was designed to provide the Macintosh with a cohesive distributed client/server networking environment. AppleTalk, like the Macintosh, is a "user friendly" network operating system (NOS). All the actual communication operations are masked from the user. To facilitate this, AppleTalk incorporates a dual network identity structure, both operationally and contextually. The operational structure uses binary network addressing to represent network segments, end-nodes, and network services (such as file transfer, printing, and so on). The contextual structure uses names and logical groupings, called zones, as the user ...