AppleTalk
lorenetworking
Stands for: AppleTalk (Apple networking protocol suite)
Apple's plug-and-play networking suite of the 1980s and 90s - zero-configuration before the term existed, now discontinued.
Introduced in 1985, AppleTalk let Macs and LaserWriters self-assign addresses and find each other with no router or server - built into every Mac. It ran over LocalTalk, then EtherTalk (Ethernet) and TokenTalk (Token Ring). Unusually for its era it was not based on Xerox XNS. TCP/IP eroded it through the 1990s, and Apple ended support in Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard, 2009), pointing users to Bonjour - which carries its zero-config spirit forward on IP.
AppleTalk was Apple's networking suite from the mid-1980s, and its defining property was that it configured itself. Plug in a machine, and it acquired an address, announced itself, and appeared in a browsable list of available printers and file servers, with no administrator involved at any point.
That was extraordinary at the time and it is easy to forget how extraordinary. The contemporary alternative involved manually assigned addresses, configuration files and someone who knew what they were doing. AppleTalk let a school or a design studio have a working network because someone plugged in cables, which is a category difference rather than an improvement.
Its zero-configuration ideas outlived the protocol itself. Apple moved to TCP/IP like everyone else, but the service-discovery concepts reappeared as Bonjour and were standardized as mDNS and DNS-SD, which is how devices still find printers and each other on a local network today. The lesson that survived is that automatic discovery is worth genuine protocol complexity, because the alternative cost is paid by every user forever rather than once by the designers.
Also known as: appletalk, ethertalk, tokentalk, localtalk, ddp