Current position and future of EDP standards

The efforts of the current standards effort in computers and information processing on both the national and international level is concerned with communications in its generic sense and in specification of techniques and media. The areas of communication may be defined man-to-man, man-to-machine, and machine-to-machine. The development of techniques of language, symbology, coding, and conventions comprise the set of logical standards necessary to a structured art of information processing and interchange. To implement these logical standards physical specifications are needed for media in communication, for formats, and for the interface between devices, between man and device, and between man and man.

Most of the effort to date has concentrated on the development of standards modules at a basic level which can be called upon for guidance and direction in the development of information processing systems. A good deal of the effort and the time spent to date has gone into the resolution of semantic problems in the description in concise and unambiguous terms of the scope, objective, and results of standards efforts. The general philosophy has been to attack those problems which are tractable and identify those which are not yet susceptible to negotiated or developed standards, and to build the tools and techniques necessary for their solution. A second matter of philosophy in the approach to standards efforts concomitant with the aforementioned tactic is the development of sets of related standards rather than omnibus standards. The reasons for this are two-fold: