The final step for broad market acceptance was international
standardization. The need for such a standard had been recognized by the IEC quite early, when the first fieldbus developments started. In 1985, the technical subcommittee SC65C
started the fieldbus project, which had the ambitious objective
of creating one single universally accepted fieldbus standard
for factory and process automation based on—by that time
the most promising—two approaches, namely, PROcess FIeld
BUS (PROFIBUS) and Factory Instrumentation Protocol (FIP)
[8], [12]. Against the backdrop of a quickly evolving market,
however, idealism had no chance.