Whitepapers
Mr. Packet Goes to Washington - OSI for the rest of us.
In the mid 1980's, there were several vendors with their own way of doing networking. We had networks like Banyan Vines, Mainframes, Novell, Microsoft, Digital not to mention the Department of Defense' network (ARPANET) and what has become known as the Internet. One problem we faced was "how do we get each type of network to talk to each other?" To solve this problem, the International Standards Organization (you know them for ISO 9001, 9002, etc.) proposed a standard, called Open Systems Interface, that if followed by everyone would allow each proprietary network to communicate with each other. read more