By 1983 the Internet protocols were already being recast in OSI terms.
I think it started before that. In September 1982 Padlipsky wrote RFC
871, reacting to the increasing perception that ISO had somehow invented
the concept of layering:
Despite the fact that "the ARPANET" stands as the
proof-of-concept of intercomputer networking and, as discussed in
more detail below, introduced such fundamental notions as
Layering and Virtualizing to the literature, the wide
availability of material which appeals to the International
Standards Organization's Reference Model for Open System
Interconnection (ISORM) has prompted many new- comers to the
field to overlook the fact that, even though it was largely
tacit, the designers of the ARPANET protocol suite have had a
reference model of their own all the long. That is, since well
before ISO even took an interest in "networking", workers in the
ARPA-sponsored research community have been going about their
business of doing research and development in intercomputer
networking with a particular frame of reference in mind. They
have, unfortunately, either been so busy with their work or were
perhaps somehow unsuited temperamentally to do learned papers on
abstract topics when there are interesting things to be said on
specific topics, that it is only in very recent times that there
has been much awareness in the research community of the impact
of the ISORM on the lay mind. When the author is asked to review
solemn memoranda comparing such things as the ARPANET treatment
of "internetting" with that of CCITT employing the ISORM "as the
frame of reference," however, the time has clearly come to
attempt to enunciate the ARPANET Reference Model (ARM)
publicly--for such comparisons are painfully close to comparing
an orange with an apple using redness and smoothness as the
dominant criteria, given the philosophical closeness of the CCITT
and ISO models and their mutual disparities from the ARPANET
model.
Stuart Cheshire <cheshire(_at_)apple(_dot_)com>
* Wizard Without Portfolio, Apple Computer
* Chairman, IETF ZEROCONF
* www.stuartcheshire.org