Standards

There are numerous standards that have been established worldwide relating to the

Information Technology field. To minimize the following summation, I will only describe three of these standards. The first one will be the American National Standards Institute or ANSI for short. Next, I will discuss the International Standards Organization which is commonly referred to as ISO, in more detail. Finally, the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers will be the topic of choice. All of these established standards play a role in the way we communicate electronically.

The American Engineering Standards Committee, founded in 1918 was the proud predecessor to ANSI. A decade later, it was reorganized and given the American Standards Association name. It took almost forty years for the name to change again to the United States of America Standards Institute. Finally, in 1969, ANSI became to what it is today: a private, non-profit standards organization.

The American National Standards Institute, produces industrial standards in the United States. This organization is a member of the International Standards Organization, otherwise known as ISO, as well as it being a member of the International Electrotechnical Commission, or IEC. ANSI’s standards encompass several areas of telecommunication. In computing, for instance, ANSI was the first to standardize the ASCII character set in X3.4, control codes in X3.41 and control sequences in X3.64. As an example, the control sequences in X3.64 are used to move the cursor around the screen of a "dumb" terminal. ANSI also standardized the ASA photographic exposure system which has become the basis for the ISO film speed system. The ASA photographic exposure system is widely used all over the world. Let’s not forget ANSI as it is used in Microsoft Windows. It refers to certain code pages that are sometimes mistaken for the ISO-8859 series, due to their similarities. Lastly, what is commonly referred to as “ANSI art” is really ASCII art that is animated through ANSI terminal control codes that were widely used on bulletin boards during the 1980’s and the 1990’s.

The International Standards Organization, formed in 1947, is a network of 153 countries. Each of these country’s national standards institute has one member in the ISO. The “Central Secretariat” of the ISO is in Geneva, Switzerland, and it overlooks and controls the system. ISO, despite its national foundation, is not a governmental organization. It does not have representatives of national governments. What it does have, is a firm position between the public and private sectors.

ISO has this governmental overtone, because its member institutes are governmental structures of their own countries. Many of these