Meta: If anyone wants to know the history of ISO, its predecessors, and the history of writing public standards, see Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting

Meta: If anyone wants to know the history of ISO, its predecessors, and the history of writing public standards, see Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting Since 1880 by Craig Murphy and JoAnne Yates (ISBN 9781421440033): > Private, voluntary standards shape almost everything we use, from screw threads to shipping containers to e-readers. They have been critical to every major change in the world economy for more than a century, including the rise of global manufacturing and the ubiquity of the internet. In Engineering Rules, JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy trace the standard-setting system's evolution through time, revealing a process with an astonishingly pervasive, if rarely noticed, impact on all of our lives. > This type of standard setting was established in the 1880s, when engineers aimed to prove their status as professionals by creating useful standards that would be widely adopted by manufacturers while satisfying corporate customers. Yates and Murphy explain how these engineers' processes provided a timely way to set desirable standards that would have taken much longer to emerge from the market and that governments were rarely willing to set. By the 1920s, the standardizers began to think of themselves as critical to global prosperity and world peace. After World War II, standardizers transcended Cold War divisions to create standards that made the global economy possible. Finally, Yates and Murphy reveal how, since 1990, a new generation of standardizers has focused on supporting the internet and web while applying the same standard-setting process to regulate the potential social and environmental harms of the increasingly global economy. * https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/engineering-rules https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/engineering-rules Edit: Presentation from one of the co-authors: > Craig Murphy, Betty Freyhof Johnson ’44 Professor of Political Science, gives a book talk with insights into the realm of global standard setting that has shaped global industries such as technology, trade, construction and the environment. He reveals the ways in which the committees of global stakeholders, which include manufacturers, users, and unaffiliated engineers collaborated to develop these standards of compliance, and the impact of these standards on human livelihoods worldwide. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg19VO7TgR8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg19VO7TgR8