Tom Lyon ✅A personal history about #AppleTalk and #SunMicrosystems
Howard Chu @ Symas@aka_pugs funny. Back around 1995 or so I was at Locus Computing, rewriting our licensed version of PacerShare which was sold as PC/Interface, into PC/Enterprise. It had a complete Appletalk on ethernet stack (Ethertalk) but it was pathetically slow, implemented as a stack of SysV STREAMS modules. I got it running faster than Apple's own native impl, and also extended it so servers could handle 32767 clients per subnet, instead of only 127.
@aka_pugs also implemented an AFP server on Unix, about a year before Apple released their own Appleshare server, and ours was faster too. Ran on AIX, HPUX, SCO, Solaris, Irix, Motorola's funky 88000 Risc boxes... Also shared a locking system with our PC/Enterprise for DOS/Windows server, so a Unix host could serve both PCs and Macs concurrently, with coordinated byte range locking. It all ran circles around anything Apple or M$ had.
@aka_pugs and we integrated AFS and DCE/DFS support, kerberos authentication, lots of other cool security & encryption features. Was a brilliant bunch of work, that all got shelved when Locus got acquired by Platinum Technology. Such a waste.