If you are here reading this, it's because you have access to the Internet. You probably use it every day and likely don't even think about how your laptop, smartphone or tablet manages to communicate with other devices around the world. Internet is simply assumed today.
Nowadays, our relationship with Internet is seamless and everything works flawlessly, but it wasn't always that way. In its beginnings, not all computers spoke the same language, there was a great dispute about what should the universal protocol of conversation be for the creation of this new form of communication.
In fact, in its early days this computer network was not even called Internet, but was only one of the protocols competing to be the standard. Internet was the only one with pioneers in a decentralized community.
Beginnings
It was the mid-1970s, and there was one goal on the minds of developers around the world: to create a network where computers could communicate with each other.
At that time, Paul Baran in the United States and Donald Davies in Europe -both pioneers of what is today now known as the Internet-, tried to convince telephone companies to get involved in the development of this network, but those companies, which at that time had a monopoly on communications in the world, refused to participate.
Both pioneers gave life to the “packet switching” concept, which served as the basis for the creation of ARPANET, the first computer network that implemented the protocol that today allows the Internet to exist: TCP/IP.
The problem at the end of the 70s was that there were different protocols for communication between computers, and each of them addressed the problem in different ways, so they were incompatible with each other. This meant that only those with the same protocol or “language” could communicate.
Battle for the global standard
At the end of the 1980s, in a quest to establish a universal communication protocol, two major models clashed: OSI and the Internet.
OSI, or Open System Interconnection, was an interconnection model supported by most governments and telephone companies. For this reason, this model began to be implemented as a standard throughout the world.
Computer companies such as IBM, SNA and DEC also created their own communication models, which were eventually adopted by Europe. In the United States, NASA also experimented and used this protocol in its internal network.
The other participant was the Internet. At that time, the project was under development, supported by volunteers and pioneers. Those involved and working on the project were used to continuous experimentation, and believed that the OSI model committees were extremely bureaucratic and disconnected from reality regarding the networks that already existed at that time.
The problem they saw with the OSI model was its number of layers, which they said made OSI “unnecessarily complicated, inefficient and non-performance-enhancing”.
So, how did a group of volunteers managed to get their protocol to become the one used by the entire planet?
Teamwork for the win
This project (the Internet) was carried out in a decentralized way. There was no leader in the development, but everyone was working towards the same goal. Thanks to this, the community was able to develop in months what took OSI's bureaucratic committees years.
In theory, OSI was the official model, slowly being adopted by governments and large corporations, but in practice, the community-driven TCP/IP Internet protocol was far superior and rapidly gaining traction around the world.
By 1995, the Internet community had managed to conquer the world and turn its project into a standard, all in a decentralized manner. In the aftermath, some academics claim that the adoption of TCP/IP instead of OSI enabled the scalability of Internet and made possible as we know it.