What is the OSI model?

Today I tweeted something about how the OSI model doesn’t correspond well to the reality of how TCP/IP works and it made me think – what is the OSI model, exactly? From reading some of the replies on Twitter, it seems like there are at least 3 different ways to think about it: A literal description of how TCP/IP works An abstract model that you can use to describe and compare a lot of different networking protocols A literal description of some computer networking protocols from the 1980s that ...

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