American National Standards Institute
The American National Standards Institute (typically given as the acronym, ANSI, usually pronounced "ann-see") is a large engineering standards organization with headquarters in Washington D.C. ANSI does not develop standards itself; rather, it accepts standards created by other organizations which meet ANSI's requirements for openness and accessibility, balance, and fair process.
Its initial predecessor, the American Engineering Standards Committee (AESC), was founded in 1918; the AESC became the American Standards Association (ASA) in 1928. Further deepening its use of principles such as openness and accessibility, the ASA was reorganized and renamed the United States of America Standards Institute (USASI) in 1966; it was finally renamed ANSI in 1969.
It is responsible for a number of important standards in computing, including:
- ANSI Standard C, usually called 'ANSI C', published as X3.159-1989
- ANSI Standard FORTRAN, usually called Fortran 66, published as ASA X3.9-1966 (by a predecessor to ANSI)
- ANSI Standard COBOL standards in 1968, 1974, and 1985
- Expansion of 7-bit ASCII character set (ASCII itself was originally created by a predecessor to ANSI in 1963)
- Standardization of the IBM I/O channel, as 'I/O channel interface', in 1979
As well as many other general engineering standards with application to historical computers:
- The threads of inch-based machine screws including UNC (coarse) and UNF (fine), used in very many US-designed computers.
