The International Organization for Standardization, known as ISO, is the worldwide federation of national standards bodies that develops and publishes International Standards. Founded in 1947 and headquartered in Geneva, ISO brings together standards organizations from member countries to agree on common technical specifications, so that products, services, and systems built in different nations can interoperate. In information technology, much of this work is done jointly with the International Electrotechnical Commission through their joint technical committee, which is why many computing standards carry the ISO/IEC prefix.
ISO’s most influential contribution to networking is the OSI Reference Model, published as ISO 7498 in 1984 and revised as ISO/IEC 7498-1 in 1994. The standard, “Information technology — Open Systems Interconnection — Basic Reference Model,” defines the seven-layer architecture for organizing communication between computer systems. Its foreword reflects ISO’s standard process: International Standards are prepared by technical committees, draft standards are circulated to the member bodies for voting, and publication requires approval by a substantial majority. The OSI work was carried out by subcommittee TC97/SC16, established in 1977.
The goal behind OSI was “open systems interconnection” — letting equipment from different vendors and countries communicate without locking buyers into a single manufacturer’s proprietary scheme. This was a deliberately international, governmental, and committee-driven effort, in contrast to the more informal, implementation-first culture of the ARPANET and Internet engineering community. The resulting clash of philosophies and architectures became known as the protocol wars.
Beyond OSI, ISO has standardized a great many technologies that programmers rely on. These include character sets and the foundations of Unicode (through ISO/IEC 10646), programming languages such as C and C++, the SQL database language, the PDF document format, and date and time formats such as ISO 8601. In each case ISO’s role is the same: to take a technology that has matured enough to need a stable, vendor-neutral definition and turn it into an authoritative international reference.
Although the full OSI protocol stack was largely supplanted by TCP/IP, ISO’s reference model remains the dominant framework for teaching and discussing networks, and ISO continues to be one of the central institutions through which the computing world agrees on shared, long-lived standards.