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There has been a dramatic decline in the need for and use of the AppleTalk protocol and its routing as older Apple Macintosh systems are being replaced by newer models and upgraded to the current versions of the Macintosh Operating System. Concurrently, older applications relying upon AppleTalk networking have moved towards TCP/IP based methods in their current versions.
Apple has supported the use of the TCP/IP protocol for accessing network resources such as printing and file sharing since the initial release of MacOS 8 in 1997. Consequently, Apple itself has stopped routing AppleTalk on its own corporate network in October of 1999.
Additionally, commitment to AppleTalk protocol support from network hardware and software vendors is steadily decreasing, and their latest technologies are being developed without support for AppleTalk and AppleTalk routing.
These limitations and changing industry trends therefore necessitate the discontinuation of AppleTalk routing across MITnet subnets. The elimination of a dependence on AppleTalk gives MIT the flexibility needed with the design and implementation of the future MITnet.
As of December 31, 2002, AppleTalk Zones will no longer be visible to network browsing applications (such as the MacOS Classic Chooser, MacOS Network Browser, etc). All current applications that rely on AppleTalk and have cross-subnet (cross-campus) audiences will need to be migrated to TCP/IP based implementations to continue operating. (File sharing and printing via the AppleTalk protocol to 'local' AppleTalk zone devices, i.e. devices on the same physical subnet, will continue to work but will no longer be a supported mechanism for these uses.).
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