(American National Standards Institute – American National Institute of Standards). ASNI is an organization in charge of standardizing certain technologies in the US. It is a founding member of ISO, which is the international organization for standardization. And it has representatives in the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) through the US National Committee (USNC).
ANSI is a private, nonprofit organization that enables the standardization of products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. In addition, ANSI coordinates with international standards to ensure that US products can be used worldwide.
ANSI standards seek to ensure that product features and performance are consistent, that people use the same definitions and terms, and that products are tested in the same way.
The organization is headquartered in Washington, DC, and its operations office is located in New York City.
Brief history of ANSI
* It was formed on May 14, 1918.
* Its first name was the American Engineering Standards Committee (AESC).
* It was called the American Standards Association (ASA) in 1928.
* Then United States of America Standards Institute (USASI) in 1966.
* It got its current name in 1969.
* It has 125,000 companies and 3.5 million professionals as members (2016).
* Official website: https://www.ansi.org
ANSI Operation
ANSI itself does not develop standards; the institute oversees the development and use of standards by accrediting the organizations’ standards development procedures.
An ANSI accreditation means that the procedures used by organizations in developing standards meet the requirements of openness, balance, consensus, and due process.
ANSI also designates specific standards as American National Standards (ANS) when the institute determines that the standards were developed in an environment that is equitable, accessible, and responsive to the needs of diverse stakeholders. Voluntary consensus standards accelerate product acceptance and make it clear how to improve product safety to protect consumers. There are approximately 9,500 ANS that carry the ANSI designation.
The American National Standards (ANS) process includes:
– Consensus of a group that is open to all interested parties.
– Open to public opinion and comments on draft standards.
– Consideration and response to comments.
– Incorporation of submitted changes that meet the same consensus requirements into a draft standard.
– Availability of an appeal resource for any participant, being able to allege that these principles were not respected during the process of preparing the standards.
Examples of ANSI standards
– The ASA (American Standards Association) photographic exposure system, originally defined in the ASA Z38.2.1 standard (since 1943) and ASA PH2.5 (since 1954), together with the DIN system (DIN 4512 since 1934), was became the basis of the ISO system (since 1974), currently used worldwide (ISO 6, ISO 2240, ISO 5800, ISO 12232).
– A standard for a set of values used to represent characters in digital computers. The ANSI code extends ASCII previously created under the ASA X3.4-1963 standard, with additional codes for European alphabets (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code or EBCDIC).
– The first standard computer programming language was «American Standard Fortran» (known as «FORTRAN 66»), approved in March 1966 and published as ASA X3.9-1966.
– The original standard implementation of the C programming language was standardized in ANSI X3.159-1989, better known as ANSI C.
– ANSI paper sizes (ANSI/ASME Y14.1), such as ANSI A, ANSI B, ANSI C, ANSI D, ANSI E, equivalent to A4, A3, A2, A1, A0 in ISO.
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