Standards - and Why we NEED to Standardize Them!

We are all expected to live by them, but what are they? Dictionary definitions give little help. A standard is a flag, but no two flags are the same size, shape, or color. A standard is an established norm or requirement about technical systems, something considered by an "authority" or by general consent as the approved model, type, method, or procedure for reasons of measurement, interoperability and inter-connectivity.

Whether for legal, moral, technical, grammatical, or financial reasons - we have standards, and they should be maintained. Governments at one time thought that standards were so important, that they created departments and bureaus of standards in order to insure that certain standards were adhered to.

Imagine you go to the store to buy a pound of coffee. If each of the pounds of coffee had different weight, how would you know which pound of coffee was the best deal? If I bought a ton of raw materials, and the seller sold me a ton, but his scale was "lighter" than mine - I might only wind up with 1/2 a ton according to my scale, and not have enough raw materials to produce my products! Immagine walking into an 8 foot tall room, that was designed and built by a midget with small feet?

For more than obvious reasons - standards needed to be set. So governments went about insuring that a foot was a 12 inches, and that an inch was equal to 3 barleycorn, or roughly equal to the width of the average adult's thumb. So now an inch is an inch, and an ohm is an ohm, and a Liter is a Liter, and a cup is a cup. Now why do I bring this up?

Let us take into consideration a measurement called the cup. The cup, currently used in the United States for measurement of liquid and powdered dry goods, in United States law as being equal to 240 mL. Nice. Now get out your measureing cup, and put 10 "cups" of water into the standard 10 cup coffee pot. I'll bet you can't fit more than 7 cups into the pot before you get water all over the counter. Why is that? Well the companies selling coffee pots wanted to make more money, and surely you would pay more for a 10 cup coffee pot than for a 7 cup coffee pot, even if it did only hold (typically) 6 cups of coffee.

How can they get away with it? Easy. It is their "legal" contention that a person does not fill a coffee cup all the way up to the top, and so it is intended that the pot will hold 10 cups of coffee based on how much coffee someone puts in a cup. The only thing wrong with that is - my coffee cup, which isn't considered a big cup by most people, will be regularly filled with about 3 "coffee pot cups", and so I can only get 3 or 4 "cups" of coffee out of a 10 pot cup before it is empty! Now to me this is fraud, and they are breaking the Standard - but to them - they simply wrote a "different standard" (is that an oxymoron?)

Getting down to brass tacks, nails were measured in pennies, but the penny, depending on the year, could be made of different metals, and so has different weight. So a 10 penny nail could weigh more - or less - than 10 pennies!

What does all this have to do with electronics? Simple. Look at the Digital 'Standard" for a video signal. You go out to buy a digital television set in the united states, and it could view pictures in 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio, it could view a 16:9 picture squished in a 4:3 format, or a 4:3 picture stretched to fit a 16:9 screen. UGLY at best - and they call this High Definition? Speaking of High Definition - there are different standards of that. The old standard, NTSC - had 525 lines of resolution, interlaced. Modern HDTV "standards" can be anywhere from 480 lines (lower than what we had) to 1024 lines (not quite double what we had) and several versions in-between. To confuse things even more, those 480, 720, 1024 (etc) lines can either be interlaced (480i) or they can be progressively scanned (1024p).

I can't blame the broadcasters though - or even the consumer equipment manufacturers. The standards they adopted were forced on them by the FCC, who took their suggestions from the "computer industry".

Now lets consider computer standards for a moment. RS232 standard was well laid out. Signal was on pins 2 and 5, with ground on pin 1. ALWAYS. It was a 9 in D shaped connector ALWAYS. And any Male connector would fit any Female connector. ALWAYS!!! This was a standard. It never changed, and it flat worked. I have 1960's equipment I have to occasionally maintain that STILL takes input via an RS232 jack, and it is robust and just plain always works. Fast Forward to its replacement, RS422 - which using the same connector, could be using any possible configuration of the pins, depending on the manufacturer. What happened? Simple - capitalism.

You see - if something is a STANDARD, then everyone has to use it. If everyone has to use it, then you can't have a copyright on it. If you can't hold a copyright, you can't keep the competition from using it. So now your competition has the same thing you do - the only to beat them in sales is to sell more, which is hard to do when your product isn't somehow better.

So now you have a standards committee make an international standard for HTML so that all web browsers will see a web page roughly the same. Microsoft for example (not picking on them - just using them for an example), may decide that they will not quite follow the standard, but make a different standard, which of course is proprietary, and only THEIR browser (Internet Explorer) follows that standard. Then the make a program like Frontpage that writes code following their proprietary standard. When other browsers go to that site, the page doesn't come up properly. Of course to fix the problem, you as the end user, are supposed to use their proprietary browser to view their proprietary code. Standards be damned - we'll do it our way, and if you don't like it, you have to use our substandard standard anyway! This of course, forces you to use their products - sort of like a monopoly? Of course if you happen to use a Macintosh (Apple) computer, then Mac has to make a deal with Microsoft to allow them to use the Microsoft standard in the Macintosh browser (Opera). The same would apply to Linux, or any other operating system or browser that isn't owned by Microsoft.

Now like I said - Microsoft isn't the target of this article - STANDARDS is. The same can be said for inter-connectivity standards, Television Standards, and even automotive standards. Because Commercialization and Proprietary have become the catchwords, STANDARD has gone by the way side. Computer and other "technical" companies seem to think that standards are no longer important to us?!

Perhaps they are not. So I tell you what Mr Gates... Why don't you ask me for change for a dollar? You give me your STANDARD dollar (US) and I'll exchange it for my STANDARD quarters (actually 4 half inch galvanized washers). As a matter of fact - if you give me 1000 pounds of US dollars, I'll give you 1000 pounds of my "standard" quarters! But I get to use MY scale for the pounds.... just so we both know they are the same weight!

To learn more about electronic and computer standards - go to ElectronicsTheory.Com