LocalTalk PC Board Info Page

The search is on!

For those not familiar with the LocalTalk PC board, here's a little background. The LocalTalk PC board is an expansion board for your IBM/PC compatible that allows your PC to talk with your Macintosh; it's a network card. LocalTalk is the hardware protocol for the physical network medium, including pinouts, voltage specifications, etc. The network protocol that the two computers use is AppleTalk. To draw an analogy, LocalTalk is equivalent to 10baseT network wiring and hardware. AppleTalk is equivalent to, say, the Microsoft Networking protocol. For more details about the card, including the hardware that lives on it, peek at Apple's Tech Info Library page about it.

There are several LocalTalk PC adapters available in the market. The ones that I have are Apple-made boards. Apple originally manufactured the LocalTalk PC boards, but along about May 1991, handed the job over to Farallon. Since then, Farallon has built the boards, and recently (1993 or 1994) discontinued them. Other manufacturers are Dayna, COPS, Centrum Systems West (makers of the SUN/TOPS Flashcards (others?)

Recently (i.e., within the last year or two), there has been growing desire to have drivers written for these cards that are compatible with operating systems other than MS-DOS (for example, a driver for Linux). But here's where the trouble starts. It seems that techinal specifications for these boards are incredibly hard to come by. Now, by tech specs, I'm not refering to how the DIP switches work, but rather low-level programming details. So the search is on to find tech specs for the Apple or any other LocalTalk boards.

I have been searching, actively and passively, for this information since about June 1995. That's a long time to look for something on the Internet! But that shows you just how hard it is to find anything about this card! My efforts have not been compeletely fruitless, fortunately. So far, I have found the follow:

• It appears that an IP routing software package is available for use under DOS. The utility of this package is to route IP packets over an AppleTalk network. The PC with the Ethernet and LocalTalk adapaters serves as this router. The software is available on Digital's FTP site, at ftp.digital.com/pub/net/ip/routing/pc.

• Cool news! COPS has made available an SDK for their localtalk boards. There's even a mailing list for Localtalk development with this SDK. Send a message with the subject subscribe to ltdev@copstalk.com.

  As more information evolves from COPS, they will post it at their Localtalk developer's WWW site. Additional information about COPS, as shared by the company president Guy Mariande, is now available.

• Apple's Developer's Association (APDA) has a tech note detailing Apple's LocalTalk card, including hardware specifications and code for software drivers. The bad thing is, APDA no longer sells this tech note, and has none in stock. So I'm looking for APDA part number M7055, a technical noted entitiled LocalTalk PC Card and Driver Preliminary Notes from wherever I can find it. Do you have a copy? If so, please let me know!

• Apple has an online Technical publications list. This was helpful in tracking down the reference to the M7055 above.

• Some folks from UC Davis have written an FTP implementation for DOS that uses the DOS version of the LocalTalk driver, ATALK.SYS. The original site is somewhere, and I have compressed and uncompressed local copies, both PostScript (11 pages) (.gz) and text only (.gz) at this site.

  There is also a README file that is associated with this driver; thanks to Darryl Lee for tracking it down for me.

• There is a mailing list for people interested in the Linux driver developement. The list is the LINUX-ATALK mailing list. To subscribe, send mail to
  listserv@netspace.org
  with the following in the body:

  SUBscribe LINUX-ATALK

• Someone on the above mailing list mentioned that they have an alpha driver of written for linux. The fellow's name is Bradford W Johnson; you can contact him at johns393@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU.