The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them.
This old saw is arguably less true than in years past. Today, for a lot of reasons, there's more pressure to reach agreement on one way to do a certain thing. (Think the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray debacle for an example of what happens when vendors can't agree on a single approach.)
Standards aren't a single thing. Some have been blessed with the appropriate incantations by some official or quasi-official body. Others come from an industry consortium. And still others are "de facto" (or at least began life that way)--the result of a dominant company or just a default way of doing things.
The purist will argue that just being widely used doesn't make something a standard. I agree up to a point and only use the "standard" term in this case for things for are truly ubiquitous. Contrariwise, a rigorous formal ratification process is no guarantee of success.
But some standards do win big and become part of just how IT gets done. Here are some of them.
Like many other successful standards, Ethernet has remained a fixture in local area networks for so many years in part by adapting to many successive waves of technology. First developed in the famous Xerox PARC labs in the mid-1970s, it initially ran over coaxial cable but soon moved to twisted pair cable with the 10 Mbit/second generation. 10 Gbit/second Ethernet is now starting to roll out along with a variety of additions to the specification that make it more suitable as a high-performance unified fabric.
Ethernet's initial success resulted in no small part from coordinated standardization efforts beginning in the IEEE. This helped it beat out alternatives, most notably IBM's Token Ring. Over time, Ethernet's ubiquity and the cost benefits provided by this volume helped it largely stave off server interconnect challengers. InfiniBand has had wins in high-performance computing and certain other clustering applications, but it didn't displace Ethernet as a "server area network" as early promoters had hoped.
PCI, Peripheral Component Interconnect, had its beginnings as an Intel-developed bus for connecting internal cards within systems. The version 1.0 spec came out in 1992. Given the ubiquity of PCI these days, it's easy to forget that it only replaced a plethora of other busses both standardized and proprietary in x86 and, later, large Unix servers based on other processors over the course of nearly a decade.
Nor was the process steady. Although PCI was initially introduced in part to replace the VESA Local Bus for graphics cards--which it eventually did--PCI was itself replaced by AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) for a time prior to the PCI Express generation.
PCI Express makes for an interesting case study in the marketing of standards. With technology bumping up against the limits of parallel I/O busses like conventional PCI, the Arapahoe Working Group--spearheaded by Intel--started pushing a new serial interconnect standard in about 2001. Arapahoe's success was by no means pre-ordained. AMD's HyperTransport was one alternative among several.
Arapahoe required hardware that was largely different from PCI but it was compatible with PCI's software model in a number of respects. And this was enough to get Arapahoe adopted by the keeper of the PCI standard, the PCI-SIG, and get the SIG's imprimatur on what would now be called PCI Express. And that helped make it the obvious heir to PCI. Names matter. (Here's a more detailed accounting of PCI Express and its history.)
It's easy to forget just how painful it could be, in the years before USB (Universal Serial Bus), to connect external peripherals to a computer system. RS-232, a long-used and successful standard in its own right, was the most common way. It was also a way that could easily devolve into examinations of cable pin-outs, interrupt channels, and memory addresses.
USB was a cooperative effort by a group of large technology vendors who founded a non-profit corporation to manage the specification. Version 1.0 was introduced in 1996. Now up to version 3.0, USB has 