Standards Organizations

Because of the wide number of hardware manufacturers, a standard is essential in order to connect one computer to another computer if a
different type. There are recognized and widely accepted standards governing how data is to be transmitted, whether asynchronously, parallel, or
synchronously. Standards govern the format of the data, and also specify the hardware details like voltages to use, bit durations, speeds etc.
The major organisations responsible for standards are

Electronics Industries Association (EIA)

Made up by manufacturers in the USA, and is responsible for RS232 and similar standards.

Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE)

Professional organization of engineers. An example is the IEEE-754 standard for representing floating point numbers.
http://www.ieee.org/

American National Standards Institute (ANSI)

Represents a number of US standards organizations. Member organizations submit their standards for acceptance. An example is the
ANSI standards for representing ASCII characters.
http://www.ansi.org/

International Organization for Standards (ISO)

Has standards covering a wide range of computer related topics. The US representative is ANSI. An example is ISO9000 standard for
quality assurance.
http://www.iso.ch

International Telecommunications Union (ITU)

The ITU co-ordinates international communications and recommends standard interfaces and policies for the interconnection of
national networks. It is also involved with allocation of satellite frequencies and orbits. Members of the ITU are industry
representatives from member countries.
http://www.itu.ch

Morse Code can be used to transmit messages in English and many other languages. For languages not written with the Latin alphabet other versions
of Morse Code are used. There are versions of Morse Code for the Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and Hebrew alphabets, and for Japanese a version known as
Wabun Code (), which maps kana syllables to specific codes, is used.

The Chinese telegraph code is used to map Chinese characters to four-digit codes and then those digits are sent using standard Morse code. Korean
Morse code uses the SKATS (Standard Korean Alphabet Transliteration System) mapping, originally developed to allow Korean to be typed on western
typewriters.

Although Error control is a desirable thing to have in any communication system it is

obviously much more desirable in communication systems that handle data. Error
control resolves itself into three problems. First, there is the problem of error
prevention. Second, there is the problem of error detection, and third, there is the
problem of error correction. Error control in data systems is not a new subject.
Considerable effort has been directed toward the control of data errors perhaps long
before the invention of the Quill pen. The advent of digital computers and the
associated Data communication systems, however, has now introduced some new
sources of errors into data processing. Consequently considerable effort has been
directed in the past few years toward the development of various methods of error
control in both computer and communication systems. As a result of these efforts
many methods of controlling digital errors were devised. The use of these control
methods, however, has not kept pace with the growth of computers. The reason for
this lag lies in the fact that transmission faults are not usually the prime source of
data errors. Humans and machines also contribute errors

REDUNDANCY
A redundancy system for data communications upon two duplicate communication channels, each having
transmission and reception circuits, characterized by a switching circuit for selecting one of said two
communication channels, a single error detection circuit for detecting an error in the signal transmitted,
and a control circuit for the switching circuit arranged to cause said two communication channels to
alternately transmit signals when both the channels are in normal operation, and to cause one of said two
channels to be selected when the other fails. The two channels share the error detection circuit and the
control circuit and can therefore be built at a reduced cost and operated efficiently. Since the two
channels are regularly checked for errors, they are operated with increased reliability.