DATA COMMUNICATIONS
© Copyright Brian Brown, 1995-2000. All rights reserved.

Part 7: Standards Organizations

Organizations | Summary | Test

Introduction
This section briefly outlines some common standard organizations that are responsible for protocols like RS232 and other issues.

Objectives
At the end of this section you should be able to

• discuss why standards are important
• identify the major standards organizations and define their roles/responsibilities

Standards Organizations
Because of the wide number of hardware manufacturers, a standard is essential in order to connect one computer to another computer if a different type. There are recognized and widely accepted standards governing how data is to be transmitted, whether asynchronously, parallel, or synchronously. Standards govern the format of the data, and also specify the hardware details like voltages to use, bit durations, speeds etc.

The major organisations responsible for standards are

• Electronics Industries Association (EIA)
  Made up by manufacturers in the USA, and is responsible for RS232 and similar standards.
  
  
• Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE)
  Professional organization of engineers. An example is the IEEE-754 standard for representing floating point numbers.
  http://www.ieee.org/
  
  
• American National Standards Institute (ANSI)
  Represents a number of US standards organizations. Member organizations submit their standards for acceptance. An example is the ANSI standards for representing ASCII characters.
  http://www.ansi.org/
  
  
• International Organization for Standards (ISO)
  Has standards covering a wide range of computer related topics. The US representative is ANSI. An example is ISO9000 standard for quality assurance.
  http://www.iso.ch
  
  
• International Telecommunications Union (ITU)
  The ITU co-ordinates international communications and recommends standard interfaces and policies for the interconnection of national networks. It is also involved with allocation of satellite frequencies and orbits. Members of the ITU are industry representatives from member countries.
  http://www.itu.ch
  

Summary
There are a number of organizations responsible for standards. From a company view, standards are important because they ensure inter-operability of products and reliability.

Test 3 [JavaScript]
Now it is time to review this section and discover how much you have absorbed. Click on the hyperlink above to begin the test.

© Copyright B Brown. 1995-2000. All rights reserved.