The book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" by Katie Hafner has a nice overview of this battle of standards. Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book: "the

The book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" by Katie Hafner has a nice overview of this battle of standards. Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book: "the Internet community—people like Cerf and Kahn and Postel, who had spent years working on TCP/IP—opposed the OSI model from the start. First there were the technical differences, chief among them that OSI had a more complicated and compartmentalized design. And it was a design, never tried." Not only was OSI "never tried": "On the OSI side stood entrenched bureaucracy, with a strong we-know best attitude, patronizing and occasionally contemptuous" “Everything about OSI was described in a very abstract, academic way,” [Vint] Cerf said. “The language they used was turgid beyond belief. You couldn’t read an OSI document if your life depended on it.” Lastly, what I think is a nice and short summary of why TCP/IP "won": "[the success of TCP/IP] provided an object lesson in technology and how it advances. “Standards should be discovered, not decreed,” said one computer scientist in the TCP/IP faction. Seldom has it worked any other way."