What is ANSI?

ANSI – development of standards in the USA

ANSI stands for American National Standards Institute and is a non-profit organisation that coordinates the development of voluntary standards in the USA. ANSI, which was founded in 1918, is the only US American organisation to be a member of the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO). Corresponding counterparts are the German Institute for Norming (DIN), the Austrian Standards Institute and the Swiss Standards Association. The organisation is based in Washington, D.C.

ANSI standards and covered areas

ANSI standards cover many areas. For example,

• the PMBOK Guide was recognised by the Project Management Institute (PMI) as a project management standard (ANSI/PMI 99-001).
• the programming language C has been standardised by ANSI and is therefore also known as ANSI C.
• databases have the ANSI SPARC architecture.
• the luminous flux in projectors is measured in ANSI lumens.
• the standardisation of SCSI (for communication between computers and storage (sub)systems) is based on ANSI.
• interfaces such as Fibre Channel also dates back to ANSI.

Sometimes one reads the abbreviation “ANSI” for a group of character sets based on ASCII, but there is no ANSI standard for that.