Network Wiring

LocalTalk and Ethernet

LocalTalk

The first Mac network was AppleTalk. Using the RS-422 high speed serial port on the back of two Macs along with the right cable, you had an instant two computer network. To grow beyond that, whether by adding a LaserWriter or more Macs, you bought Apple's AppleTalk adapters and cabling.

Compared with networking in the rest of the computer world, AppleTalk was very affordable. It was no speed demon, but at 230.4kbps, it was a decent performer. Compared with poky old floppy disks, it was really nice. (In the real world, you can transfer about 1 MB of data per minute.)

The folks at Farallon found a way to make this even more affordable by using plain old phone wire and PhoneNet adapters. Savvy users could buy a spool of wire, a crimping tool, a pack of RJ-11 jacks, and enough PhoneNet adapters to build a network very economically.

Needless to say, PhoneNet quickly replaced Apple's LocalTalk hardware as the choice of Mac users.

My current employer did this for years, eventually ending up with about 30 nodes on one very long chain.

But LocalTalk has three significant drawbacks:

  1. It's slow. At 230.4kbps, it's faster than a modem, but at 1 MB/min, it takes forever to move large files or do backup over the network.
  2. It gets congested. All information is broadcast to the entire network, so a few heavy users can bring it to it's knees. The more users, the worse it gets.
  3. It's a daisy chain from one device to the next to the next. If the wiring goes bad, you end up with two networks that can't talk with each other

But LocalTalk isn't that slow. ISDN service, which we consider pretty fast for internet access (well, those of us without cable or ADSL do), is half the speed of LocalTalk.

Ethernet

What if you could make LocalTalk forty times faster?

You'd have ethernet, a 10Mbps networking protocol that Apple has been pushing since the Quadra line was released in 1991.

Like LocalTalk, ethernet comes in two basic flavors: coaxial cables and phone wire. Coaxial uses similar wiring (RG-58) to most cable TV installations (RG-59) and generally daisy chains from device to device. As with LocalTalk, a wiring problem turns one network into two that cannot communicate with each other.

The newer type of ethernet is 10Base-T, which uses heavy duty phone cable. Unlike LocalTalk and coaxial ethernet, 10Base-T uses hubs. In a small network, all wires run to a single location; in larger installations, there may be several hubs in different locations tied together with ethernet cabling.

LocalTalk and Ethernet

It's a night and day difference between LocalTalk and ethernet. Both are easy to set up, but 10Base-T is forty times faster. And that's a huge difference.

The great advantage of 10Base-T is the hub - if one wire goes bad or gets cut, only one machine is off the network. This makes it much easier to locate and fix the problem.

Like regular LocalTalk, normal 10Base-T ethernet shares the entire network between every device. But using a switching hub (Farallon StarRouter for LocalTalk and a host of different ones for ethernet), the network is reconfigured on the fly so each port talks only to one other port at any given instant.

For a busy network, using a switched hub can quickly improve network throughput by 20% or more.

And for real speed demons, there are faster versions of ethernet: 100Base-T is ten times faster then plain old ethernet, and Gigabit ethernet is ten times faster than 100Base-T.

But for home use or most networks with a dozen or less devices, a regular shared 10Base-T hub is a perfect solution. Shopping around, you can find 5-port hubs for under US$50 and 8-port hubs for well under US$100.

Unless you have equipment that's LocalTalk only and can't be adapted to ethernet, ethernet is the way to go. Hardware is inexpensive, cabling is inexpensive, most Macs already have ethernet ports, and it's fast.

Next: Bridging LocalTalk and Ethernet

Go to Low End Mac Networking.

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