The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Model

In the early days of network engineering, to be able to use an application over a network connection, the application itself would include the networking components. To run Lotus 1-2-3 on a network, the application would provide the network driver stack, which would need to be installed. If you wanted to use a second application on a network, it could not use the Lotus drivers; its own network driver stack had to be installed. Quite often, these sets of network drivers from different vendors would not play well together, and one or both would fail when installed on the same computer. A consistent implementation of the networking functions wasn’t required for multiple applications to share a connection ...

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