Why were networking standards needed?

Early development of LANs, MANs, and WANs was chaotic in many ways. The early 1980s saw tremendous expansion in networking. As companies realized how much money could be saved and how much they could gain in productivity by using network technology, they began adding networks and expanding existing networks almost as rapidly as new network technologies and products were introduced. By the mid-1980s, growing pains from this expansion were being felt.

Because many of the emerging network technologies were built using different hardware and software implementations, one problem that soon surfaced was that many of the new network technologies were incompatible. Increasingly, it became difficult for networks using different specifications to communicate with each other.