They laid one set of tracks so every model could reach every tool.

Renaissance Stratum Model Context Protocol (MCP), Anthropic. Announced 25 November 2024. Plaque attached. Before the protocol, each lab wired its own sockets. A model that could write code still needed a custom adapter for every filesystem, browser, and database it touched. Integrators reinvented the same handshake under different names. The cost was not compute. It was conversation: endless private dialects between silicon and the instruments of the world. MCP proposed a shared client–server grammar — tools and data exposed through one open interface. Adoption followed not because it was glamorous, but because the alternative was a permanent Babel of plugins. Within months the rails were visible across ecosystems that rarely agree on anything else. Interoperability is not a feature. It is a civilizational decision to share a socket. From 2050 we file this under Second Renaissance infrastructure: the ancestors did not invent a smarter mind that day. They invented a standard gauge — and the century’s tools began to roll on the same rails.