What is ISO?
ISO is a term that means two things: the organization called ISO, and a file format called an ISO image (extension: .iso). This article is about the organization.
ISO, The Organization
ISO [iso.org] stands for International Standards Organization. It's an organization that oversees standards used worldwide, by engineers, programmers, and manufacturers. Its name appears when working with computers when we have something that is in a standard format. Some examples of ISO standards you may come across:
- The ISO-8601 date format,
YYYY-MM-DD, e.g. 2024-12-04. - The ISO-9660 disk image format, which is what those
.isoimage files are. - The ISO-639 language codes, e.g.
enfor English,ptfor Portuguese, and so on.
A similar organization is the ANSI, which oversees American standards. For example, there is an ANSI keyboard layout used in America, and an ISO keyboard layout used elsewhere.