Information Technology Standards (eBook)

Front Cover 1
Information Technology Standards: Quest for the Common Byte 4
Copyright Page 5
Table of Contents 8
Note 6
List of Illustrations 12
Foreword 14
Program on Information Resources Policy 16
Preface 18
Acknowledgments 24
Part I: Introduction 26
Chapter 1. What Standards Do 28
1.1 Why Standards? 29
1.2 What Standards Are Good For 32
1.3 Standards Have Their Drawba 37
1.4 What Makes a Good Standard? 39
1.5 What Makes a Successful Standard? 43
1.6 The Government and the Public Interest 48
1.7 Broader Ramifications of Standards 51
1.8 Conclusion 55
Part II: Foundations for Open Systems 62
Chapter 2. The Open Road 64
2.1 The Impetus for Open 64
2.2 Versions of Open 65
2.3 Coda 70
Chapter 3. UNIX 72
3.1 The Birth and Growth of UNIX 73
3.2 The UNIX Market Matures 75
3.3 The Federal Role 77
3.4 Why Standardize UNIX? 78
3.5 X-Windows 81
3.6 The Battles over Standards 84
3.7 Alternatives to UNIX 90
3.8 Windows NT (New Technology) 92
3.9 Conclusion 94
Chapter 4. OSI 100
4.1 The OSI Reference Model 101
4.2 OSI Standards 103
4.3 The Path to Open Standards 112
4.4 The Profiles 119
4.5 Whither OSI? 125
4.6 OSI Redux: Network Management and Routing 139
4.7 Conclusion 143
Part III: Defense-Promoted Standards 156
Chapter 5. Front-Line Manufacturing 158
5.1 Navy's CAD II Purchase 162
Chapter 6. CALS 166
6.1 The Impetus for CALS 167
6.2 The Origin of CALS 168
6.3 Group 4 Raster 171
6.4 Computer Graphics Metafile 174
6.5 IGES 175
6.6 STEP 183
6.7 Beyond CALS 188
6.8 EDI 191
6.9 Conclusion 197
Chapter 7. The Ada Programming Language 204
7.1 Perfect Computer Languages: A Story 205
7.2 A Thumbnail History of Computer Languages 206
7.3 The Impetus for Ada 211
7.4 Evaluating Ada 214
7.5 Why Ada Is Not a Programmers' Language 216
7.6 Ada in Business Applications 219
7.7 OOPS 221
7.8 Ada9X 225
7.9 Conclusion 227
Part IV: High-Bandwidth Public Communications 236
Chapter 8. To the Gigabit Station 238
8.1 Public Policy 239
8.2 Of Bits and Bandwidth 240
8.3 Summary 243
Chapter 9. ISDN: Narrow and Broad 246
9.1 The Promise of ISDN 247
9.2 ISDN History 253
9.3 Standards 257
9.4 No Support from Federal Policy 259
9.5 The Road Not Taken 261
9.6 A Transition to Broadband 264
9.7 Wide Area Networking 266
9.8 ATM 272
9.9 The Once and Future Internet 275
9.10 Conclusion 281
Chapter 10. A Congress of Libraries 290
10.1 Compound Documents 291
10.2 Hypertext 299
10.3 SQL 306
10.4 Advanced Queries 311
10.5 Standards for Image Compression 313
10.6 Conclusion 326
Part V: Toward the Common Byte 336
Chapter 11. Some Limits of Standards Policy 338
11.1 Cryptography 338
11.2 VHDL 342
11.3 NGC 345
11.4 SDTS 347
11.5 TRON: The Real-Time Operating Nucleus 349
11.6 Conclusion 351
Chapter 12. The Future of Standards 356
12.1 Neither Open Nor Closed 356
12.2 Middleware 360
12.3 Whither Interoperability? 364
12.4 Global Integration 366
12.5 Conclusion 369
Chapter 13. So Many Standards, So Little Time 372
13.1 The Search for the Common Byte 372
13.2 What Works? 382
13.3 Standards as Public Policy 383
13.4 NIl 385
Appendixes 388
A Computers and Communications: A Tutorial 390
B Chronologies 398
Abbreviations and Acronyms 404
Index 414