What Is Open Transport?
The history of Open Transport is a tale of two protocols, MacTCP and Open Transport. MacTCP was a TCP/IP standard implementation for Macintosh operating systems that replaced AppleTalk in 1988. The protocol was used until 1995 when it was replaced by Open Transport in both networking and file sharing. Open Transport was developed in response to the proliferation of internet-based applications, like email and web browsers, which MacTCP did not support. Additionally, Apple wanted to create a more secure protocol than what was available at the time. Open Transport software allows Macintosh computers to communicate with other computers running TCP/IP. It was first introduced in 1994 and is currently used on Mac systems running macOS. Open Transport was designed to replace AppleTalk, which Apple developed in the 1980s. The latter was limited by its reliance on the AppleTalk protocol, which limited network size to 65,535 devices per network. The newer Open Transport relies on TCP/IP, allowing greater scalability. Open Transport is built on Mentat Portable Streams (MPS), a Unix-originated System V STREAMS platform that supports Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). Open Transport supported AppleTalk and launched with the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI)-based Power Mac 9500 (version 7.5.2). Open Transport was a transport layer network interface developed by Apple Computer for their classic Mac OS operating system. Mac OS X eventually replaced it, but Open Transport application programming interfaces (API) are available as compatibility layers for older applications. Open Transport was first released in 1993 with System 7.1 and was included in all subsequent versions of the classic Mac OS until 1999. During this period, it was also used in Apple's eWorld online service, which allowed users to connect to the Internet through dial-up connections. Open Transport provided a low-level interface between the Internet Protocol stack and device drivers. In other words, it allowed applications to communicate with hardware devices such as modems or ethernet adapters without worrying about networking details or protocols. This made it possible for developers to write programs that worked across different physical networks without knowing how those networks worked themselves!
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