The world is TCP/IP but this wasn't always so. Another stack of protocols were intended to replace TCP/IP in the early 1990's. These protocols were part of a family called OSI for Open Systems Interconnection. It represented an attempt by the companies that had rejected TCP/IP (notably IBM and Digital Equipment) to impose a standard using the hammer of government mandates to have a better mousetrap.
It failed because of its complexity and inertia from its backers to produce what the TCP/IP backers had do: cheap working code available as open source.
Someone at Slashdot was recently thinking about this as well.
One Protocol to Rule Them All? Maybe Not (Datamation) discusses the last commerical customers using DECNET.
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