By the late 1980s, the world had many competing vendor-proprietary networking models plus two competing standardized networking models.  So what happened?  TCP/IP won in the end.  Proprietary protocols are still in use today in many networks, but much less so than in the 1980s and 1990s.  The OSI model, whose development suffered in part because of a slower formal standardization process as compared with TCP/IP, never succeeded in the marketplace.  And TCP/IP, the networking model created almost entirely by a bunch of volunteers, has become the most prolific set of data networking protocols ever.

I read this over the weekend in my Cisco networking book (last paragraph on page 21 of the CCENT book).  And it stopped me dead in my tracks.  The timeliness with OpenSim’s 2nd birthday was just striking, and made me even more convinced that we are working on the future Apache of 3D applications.

Happy Birthday OpenSim.  You are a really tallented 2 year old already, I can’t even imagine what you’ll do at 4.