AppleTalk includes a number of features that allow local area networks to be connected with no prior setup or the need for a centralized router or server of any sort.

Connected AppleTalk-equipped systems automatically assign addresses, update the distributed namespace, and configure any required inter-networking routing.

Many of AppleTalk's more advanced autoconfiguration features have since been introduced in Bonjour, while Universal Plug and Play serves similar needs.

[2] At that time, early LAN systems were just coming to market, including Ethernet, Token Ring, Econet, and ARCNET.

This was a topic of major commercial effort at the time, dominating shows like the National Computer Conference (NCC) in Anaheim in May 1983.

The initial concept was known as AppleBus, envisioning a system controlled by the host Macintosh polling "dumb" devices in a fashion similar to the modern Universal Serial Bus.

[8] The Macintosh team had already begun work on what would become the LaserWriter and had considered a number of other options to answer the question of how to share these expensive machines and other resources.

A series of memos from Bob Belleville clarified these concepts, outlining the Mac, LaserWriter, and a file server system which would become the Macintosh Office.

Instead of using RS-422's balanced transmit and receive circuits, the AppleTalk cabling used a single common electrical ground, which limited speeds to about 500 kbit/s, but allowed one conductor to be removed.

Additionally, the adaptors were designed to be "self-terminating", meaning that nodes at the end of the network could simply leave their last connector unconnected.

[23][independent source needed] 1987 also marked the introduction of the AppleShare product, a dedicated file server that ran on any Mac with 512 kB of RAM or more.

[24] AppleShare was effectively the replacement for the failed Macintosh Office efforts, which had been based on a dedicated file server device.

[25] By this point, Apple had a wide variety of communications products under development, and many of these were announced along with AppleTalk Phase II.

As 10BASE-T became the de facto cabling system for Ethernet, second-generation Power Macintosh machines added a 10BASE-T port in addition to AAUI.

A few years later, MacIP was separated from the SEAGATE code and became the de facto method for IP packets to be routed over LocalTalk networks.

Through this period, Macs had about 2 to 3 times as many clients connected to the Internet as any other platform,[30][independent source needed] despite the relatively small overall microcomputer market share.

This led to the Open Transport efforts, which re-implemented both MacTCP and AppleTalk on an entirely new code base adapted from the Unix standard STREAMS.

Beginning about 2002 Rendezvous (the combination of DNS-based service discovery, Multicast DNS, and link-local addressing) provided capabilities and usability using IP that were similar to those of AppleTalk.

On larger networks where AARP could cause problems as new nodes searched for free addresses, the addition of a router could reduce "chattiness."

Contrast this with A records in the DNS, in which a name translates to a machine's address, not including the port number that might be providing a service.

Some newer protocols, such as Kerberos and Active Directory use DNS SRV records to identify services by name, which is much closer to the AppleTalk model.

When powered on, an AppleTalk machine broadcasts an AARP probe packet asking for a network address, intending to hear back from controllers such as routers.

Built on top of AppleTalk Session Protocol (for legacy AFP over DDP) or the Data Stream Interface (for AFP over TCP), it provides services for authenticating users (extensible to different authentication methods including two-way random-number exchange) and for performing operations specific to the Macintosh HFS filesystem.

At the time it was being developed, a full, reliable connection-oriented protocol like TCP was considered to be too expensive to implement for most of the intended uses of AppleTalk.

This way, it could respond to duplicate requests with the same transaction ID by resending the same response data, without performing the actual operation again.

AppleTalk's DDP corresponds closely to the Network layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) communication model.

[36] This was the only part of AppleTalk that required periodic unsolicited broadcasts: every 10 seconds, each router had to send out a list of all the network numbers it knew about and how far away it thought they were.

The initial default hardware implementation for AppleTalk was a high-speed serial protocol known as LocalTalk that used the Macintosh's built-in RS-422 ports at 230.4 kbit/s.

PhoneNet's low cost, flexibility, and easy troubleshooting resulted in it being the dominant choice for Mac networks into the early 1990s.

AppleTalk protocols also came to run over Ethernet (first coaxial and then twisted pair) and Token Ring physical layers, labeled by Apple as EtherTalk and TokenTalk, respectively.