Autonomic Computing

A Brief History of Open Standards

In the 1980s, computing technology started to become more stratified with much more distinct horizontal structures. Vendors had very proprietary architectures, and it was extremely difficult to interface data and communications with other computer systems. This led to greater degrees of modularization and interoperability, and the development of a marketplace for peripherals. The net effect was an increase in the rate of innovation, greater value for customers, and a certain degree of loss of account control by hardware vendors. The software side of the equation also saw horizontal stratification. Operating systems started to become much more generic and independent of hardware platforms. The middleware layer ...