Like with having to dig into WDEF and CDEF resource fork entries to make a GUI application, I am inclined to view that more as a limitation of the technology an

Like with having to dig into WDEF and CDEF resource fork entries to make a GUI application, I am inclined to view that more as a limitation of the technology and the era, not a feature. It certainly wasn't what Apple wanted to do. Mac networking was, of course, supposed to be Appletalk, a system with no configuration dialogues for normal use beyond a human-readable setting for the computer's name. It also worked surprisingly well. The idea you could just connect two computers together and they'd automatically network was absent from most of the competition for another decade or more. (For the record, I consider myself an anti-Apple fanboy. But it's only honesty that Appletalk was a big deal.)