At the dawn of networks, most devices used proprietary software and protocols that allowed communication only with other devices of the same manufacturer or those that had access to those protocols. There were no real means of interacting outside of your organization at that time, so this wasn’t a big issue since most organizations purchased their equipment from the same manufacturer. In recent years, this has changed, and there is now a need to communicate with systems owned by other organizations. Because this equipment was unlikely to be made by the same company, it couldn’t communicate with the other organization’s devices. In order to address this, a standard model was requested that would be made publicly available for everyone to use. These two models became the standards:
- OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model
- TCP/IP model
