Open Systems Interconnection - History

History

Prior to OSI, networking was largely either government-sponsored (ARPANET, CYCLADES) or vendor-developed and proprietary standards such as SNA and DECnet. In the UK work on the Experimental Packet Switched system circa 1973, the need to define so called higher level protocols above the HDLC link level communications protocol and the content of an NCC (UK) publication 'Why Distributed Computing' resulting from considerable research into future configurations for computer systems resulted in the UK presenting the case for an International Standards Committee to cover this area at the ISO meeting in Sydney in March 1977. OSI was hence an industry effort, attempting to get industry participants to agree on common network standards to provide multi-vendor interoperability. It was common for large networks to support multiple network protocol suites, with many devices unable to interoperate with other devices because of a lack of common protocols. However, while OSI developed its networking standards, TCP/IP came into widespread use on multivendor networks for internetworking, while on the local network level both Ethernet and token ring gained prominence.

The OSI reference model was a major advance in the teaching of network concepts. It promoted the idea of a consistent model of protocol layers, defining interoperability between network devices and software. The OSI model was defined in raw form in Washington DC in February 1978 by Hubert Zimmerman of France and the refined standard was published by the ISO in 1984.