Chapter 22. Networking

Since the 1990s, it has become increasingly rare for computers to be regarded as stand-alone devices. Most will be connected to the Internet, and a lot will run as part of a local-area network (LAN) as well.

The NeXT systems were designed for networking from the start. The original NeXT workstation was one of the first to come with Ethernet as standard and most ran in a networked configuration. Since then, the support for networking in the operating system has evolved a great deal, and a modern OS X system provides a large number of network-related libraries for developers.