Tuesday, September 2, 2008

OSI vs. TCP/IP stacks

During our discussion in class today, I kept meaning to ask why we have two networking stack specifications. We now know a lot more of TCP/IP's history, but why was it even developed if we already had the OSI model? Did we already have the OSI model?

This webpage (the first search result returned by Google) offers a brief explanation of the differences between the two, and explains that "The adoption of TCP/IP does not conflict with the OSI standards because the two protocol stacks were developed concurrently."

The Wikipedia article on the OSI initiative says that "OSI was an industry effort, attempting to get everyone to agree to common network standards to provide multi-vendor interoperability.

The wikipedia articles on both protocols (TCP/IP Model and OSI Model) are interesting further reading for anybody who is as curios as I was.

2 comments:

Bin Daniel Dai said...

Wow, thanks a lot for your effort to provide me this information.

Randy H. Katz said...

The OSI specification is actually a reference model developed independently from the Internet architecture and largely disdained by that community. While some organizations have attempted to create networks to that specification -- most commonly in Europe in the late 1980s -- today it is used many as a tool for explaining network considerations.