Shortly after OPC's release in 1996, the OPC Foundation was created to maintain OPC standards. The first OPC standard was the OPC Specification, which is now known as the OPC Data Access Specification or OPC Data Access.

The first OPC standard was based on technologies such as OLE, Component Object Model (COM) and Microsoft's Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM). The OPC Specification included objects, interfaces and methods used by manufacturers for process control and automation application interoperability and real-time data management.