The Definition of Insanity

Until recently I didn’t think much about International Standards Organization (ISO) standards. I guess most people are the same. ISO standards cover a range of different things such as pipe threads (ISO standard number 7) to shoe sizes (ISO 9407) to photographic film speeds (ISO 5800). Although they’re invisible to the lay person, much of modern life is made easier by their international adoption; think how difficult it would be to buy shoes from China without standard sizes, for example.

In the computing world, ISO standards have a mixed record. Back in the early days of computer networking, starting around 1977, ISO developed a networking protocol standard which ended up being completely sidelined when it ran into the working TCP/IP protocol standard that became the Internet. I still remember going to presentations that confidently predicted the transition of all networks to the ISO seven layer networking stack. However, ISO did standardize the UNIX commands and application programming interface POSIX, which brought some sanity to the fractured worlds of proprietary UNIX implementations. It seems that computing ISO standards work better when they standardize something that already exists.

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