Which is ironic, because I remember TCP/IP maturing in the protocol wars of the 90s. My Cisco course specifically covered the protocols separately from the media layers because you couldn’t know if your future employer still leveraged Token Ring, or ATM, or IPX, or TCP; a decade later, the course had drastically simplified to “ethernet” and “TCP/IP” only.

Many of these came from companies who created the protocol solely to push products, which meant the protocols themselves had to compete outside of the vacuum chamber of software alone and instead operate in real world scenarios and product lines. This also meant that as we engineers and SysAdmins deployed them in our enterprises, we quite literally voted with our wallets where able on the gear and protocols that met our needs. Unsurprisingly, TCP/IP won out for general use because of its low cost of deployment and ongoing support compared to alternatives, and that point is lost on the modern engineer that’s just looking at this stuff as “paper problems”.