"Twenty years ago, virtually all companies selling networking products sold products based on proprietary protocols. These vendors were hoping to dominate the networking market by locking out other vendors who did not support their protocols.
"Among these vendors were then-LAN software giant Novell and Microsoft. What none foresaw was the emergence of a vendor-neutral standards body, the Internet Engineering Task Force. The IETF was developing a set of protocols that would supplant the current protocols of these vendors, as well as their dreams of network domination..."
