Editing AppleTalk (section)

=== LocalTalk, EtherTalk, TokenTalk, and AppleShare ===
By 1987, Ethernet was clearly winning the standards battle over Token Ring, and in the middle of that year, Apple introduced '''EtherTalk 1.0''', an implementation of the AppleTalk protocol over the Ethernet physical layer. Introduced for the newly released [[Macintosh II]] computer, one of Apple's first two Macintoshes with expansion slots (the Macintosh SE had one slot of a different type), the operating system included a new Network [[System Settings|control panel]] that allowed the user to select which physical connection to use for networking (from "Built-in" or "EtherTalk"). At introduction, Ethernet interface cards were available from [[3Com]] and Kinetics that plugged into a [[NuBus|Nubus]] slot in the machine. The new networking stack also expanded the system to allow a full 255 nodes per LAN. With EtherTalk's release, AppleTalk Personal Network was renamed '''[[LocalTalk]]''',{{sfn|Oppenheimer|2004|loc=Slide 30}} the name it would be known under for the bulk of its life. Token Ring would later be supported with a similar '''TokenTalk''' product, which used the same Network control panel and underlying software. Over time, many third-party companies would introduce compatible Ethernet and Token Ring cards that used these same drivers.

The appearance of a Macintosh with a direct Ethernet connection also magnified the Ethernet and LocalTalk compatibility problem: Networks with new and old Macs needed some way to communicate with each other. This could be as simple as a network of Ethernet Mac II's trying to talk to a LaserWriter that only connected to LocalTalk. Apple initially relied on the aforementioned LocalTalk-to-Ethernet bridge products, but contrary to Apple's belief that these would be low-volume products, by the end of 1987, 130,000 such networks were in use. AppleTalk was at that time the most used networking system in the world, with over three times the installations of any other vendor.{{sfn|Oppenheimer|2004|loc=Slide 32}}{{third-party inline|date=June 2012}}

1987 also marked the introduction of the [[AppleShare]] product, a dedicated [[file server]] that ran on any Mac with 512&nbsp;kB of [[RAM]] or more. A common AppleShare machine was the [[Mac Plus]] with an external [[SCSI]] [[hard drive]]. AppleShare was the #3 [[network operating system]] in the late 1980s, behind [[Novell NetWare]] and Microsoft's [[MS-Net]].<ref>{{cite magazine |first=Laura |last=DiDio |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MRMEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA17 |title=Study finds NetWare to be OS of choice |magazine=[[Network World]] |date=11 July 1988 |page=17}}</ref> AppleShare was effectively the replacement for the failed Macintosh Office efforts, which had been based on a dedicated file server device.