Apple Talk is Apples own proprietary networking scheme. You only need it if you have multiple Macs on your network and want to share between them etc. It made networking servers, clients and printers very easy back in the day.
To be honest, I have not played with AT since OS9, so I don't even know how it works in OSX anymore.
Baggss, works great in OSX Jaguar, Panther and Tiger but in Tiger they changed it a bit so it does not like AT in say 8.6 and below. Forget the message, but it works fine with 9.1-9.2.2.
I use it here to talk to my Print server and for network shares with my older OS9 Macs.
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