The standards for Network Cabling are developed by the IEEE (Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers)
The standards are broken down into Categories, which must meet certain requirements.
For example; You will hear of a Cat5e Cable, this means that it is of suitable manufacture that it will allow gigabit speeds of up 100 meters.
The original TCP/IP model was developed in the 1970s for use in ARPANET. ARPANET was a Wide Area Network that predates the Internet. It was thought that this kind of Network would be used by military installations and Universities, and would be used to connect tens to hundreds of machines. Nothing remotely on the scale of what exists today.
Whilst explaining about the OSI and TCP/IP Models, I'm going to avoid discussing the Protocols that function within them. This is because I'm planning on writing separate posts about individual protocols.