Ever wonder about the role IEEE standards play in your personal computer? They ensure many things go right—for example, that a disk drive from any manufacturer can be cabled to a computer from another, and that data can be readily downloaded from any digital camcorder to a computer.

Thanks to nine IEEE standards, data flow in and out of the computer smoothly, software runs properly, and the information in the system can be protected from hackers.

“IEEE standards are everywhere in a computer—for example, even buried way inside the microprocessor chip, where you might not even know they’re there,” says Senior Member Bob Grow, chair of the IEEE  802.3 Ethernet working group and principal architect in the Intel Communications Group in San Diego.

These days, thanks to standards, “plug and play” is often taken for granted and we’re surprised when things don’t work.

“If standards development is done properly, consumers get a much better product that gets adopted quickly, is compatible, and lowers users’ frustration. When you don’t have standards, you have confusion,” says Member Larry Stein, chair of the IEEE 1284.3 working group and president of Warp Nine Engineering in San Diego. The 1284 working group produced the standard for parallel ports that hook up to printers, while the 1284.3 working group developed the standard for ports for other peripherals, such as disk drives.

ALL WIRED UP Look at the back of your computer and you’ll find a socket for plugging in a networking cable. The physical and data transmission details about the cable and its plugs are spelled out in IEEE 802.3, the Ethernet network standard.

“Ethernet is the most popular connection for communication in the world,” Grow says. With Ethernet, your computer can send and receive 10, 100, or 1000 megabits per second to and from an office network or home broadband Internet connection. The Ethernet protocol outlined in IEEE 802.3 is called “carrier-sense multiple access with collision detection.” This term indicates that with multiple devices on the network, an

Ethernet-compliant network interface listens for anything already on the net before transmitting its data. It  holds off sending anything if it detects something else communicating at the same time.

“Ethernet, implemented by almost everybody in communications, adapts how data [are] sent as computing technology improves,” Grow says. “It’s simple, easy to use, and pervasive. You plug it in and it works.”

If standards development is done properly, CONSUMERS GET A MUCH BETTER PRODUCT

Even if you access the Internet with the wireless network connection specified in IEEE 802.11 for a wireless local area network interface, Ethernet is involved. Your data may travel wirelessly to an IEEE 802.11 access point, but this access point is usually plugged into a wired Ethernet connection.

GETTING CRYPTIC  With so much data flying over Internet, Ethernet, and wireless networking connections, you want to make sure nobody is listening in, which is where IEEE 1363, “Public Key Cryptography,” comes in. It makes sure that two computers can talk to each other and that no one else is tapping in.

“Cryptography is the science of data scrambling,” explains Member William Whyte, chair of the 1363 working group. “You don’t want to scramble the data if the person on the other end doesn’t know how to unscramble it. The standard ensures that we can all agree on an unscrambling method that works.”

A PARALLEL PORT OF CALL  The cable running from the back of your computer to an ink-jet printer is most likely based on the IEEE 1284-2000 standard, which defines the signaling protocols for parallel port connections. The “2000” identifies the year of the last revision and ensures that the computer can talk to your printer regardless of who built the two pieces of equipment.

“IEEE 1284-2000 allows peripherals such as printers to perform better and faster,” Stein says. “Pages that used to take 40 seconds to print can now be done in three or four seconds.”

In the 1980s, non-standard parallel ports, in which the bits of a data would be transmitted simultaneously on parallel lines, were used for connecting printers. The connection wasn’t very quick, but it could transfer information faster than the day’s printers could handle. By the 1990s, some companies realized the parallel port could do more than handle printer data; it could handle the much higher data rates associated with external hard-disk drives and could transfer data in both directions.

The IEEE 1284 working group came together to create a bidirectional parallel port standard, and data rates jumped from 15 000 bytes per second to 1 megabyte per second. Manufacturers of peripheral devices—such as Zip disk drives, CD-ROMs, and tape drives—recognized the potential of such a port and got involved along with printer and computer manufacturers in developing the standard. By 1996, Senior Member Don Wright, chair of the IEEE 1284-2000 working group, notes, every computer on the market had an IEEE 1284 parallel port.

“And it was adopted at lighting speed,” Wright recalls.

ACTION! After recording digital home movies of a family vacation or taking digital snapshots of a child’s first birthday, you have to get that information from the camera to the computer for editing, sharing, or printing. Video needs a high-speed connection, which is why IEEE 1394-1995, “Standard for a High Performance Serial Bus,” otherwise known as Firewire, was developed. Plug in the camcorder or digital camera via a Firewire cable to the Firewire port at the back of your computer, and the operating system recognizes the type of device and quickly downloads the data to your hard drive. But it wasn’t always that easy.

“In the early days you had to be a wizard and open up the computer and set the data rates,” says Member Gerald Marazas, chair of the IEEE 1394-1995 working group. “Consumers didn’t want to be engineers. They wanted to plug a device in and have it work.”

Firewire is employed by many computer users—from amateurs taking family snapshots to independent filmmakers, who use desktop computers to edit complex movies. The standard quickly gained popularity because, according to Marazas, more people were interested in collecting digital video and then storing and editing it on a personal machine than the developers first believed.

The IEEE 1394-1995 standard is also used to add external storage drives to a computer—to provide another place for storage.

DESIGNED FOR EFFICIENCY Many of the logic chips in your computer are designed using IEEE 1076-2000, “VHDL Language Reference Manual.” (VHDL is otherwise known as “very-high-speed hardware description language.”) With this standard, computer chip designers can create a component, or subsystem, by using a relatively easy-to-understand high-level language to spell out what the completed component should do. These instructions are then automatically converted into the design of circuits and interconnections, a process that reduces the time required to design a chip, making it less expensive and less prone to design mistakes.

Newer, more sophisticated chips with analog features—such as a radio transmitter—are now designed using an amendment to the original VHDL standard, IEEE 1076.1-1999, the analog and mixed-signal extensions for VHDL. Previously any analog parts of complex chips had to be designed by hand, according to Member Tom Kazmierski, chair of the IEEE 1076.1 working group; the new standard helps to automate that process.

MOVING RIGHT ALONG  Application programs written to comply with IEEE 1003.1 will work properly regardless of what operating system you’re using.

“When you write an application, you want it to run across multiple platforms,” says Member Andrew Josey, chair of the IEEE 1003.1 working group. “This standard allows you, for example, to develop an application for Sun Microsystems’ Solaris platform and run it on another operating system, such as a version of Microsoft’s Windows or on Linux.”

The working group wanted to ensure wide adoption of the standard—especially among open-source software developers—so in 2002 the group posted the standard on the Web for anybody to download at no charge. Since then, the open-source community has embraced the standard, Josey says.

BY THE NUMBERS  Many programs, like spreadsheets and tax preparation software, do the number crunching for you. For those programs to run correctly, all numbers are computed and stored in memory or on hard drives in a standard way, thanks to IEEE 754, “Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic.”

Floating point is a way of noting very large or very small numbers, similar to scientific notation in which 50 000 is written as 5 X 104. Instead of a base of 10 in scientific notation, binary floating point uses a base of 2. And IEEE 754 ensures that all numbers are stored on the hard drive the same way and then outlines how the computer must perform arithmetic.

“IEEE 754 specifies how floating-point data are computed and stored, which makes it possible for computing software to work well on different computers,” says Member David Hough, editor of the IEEE 754 working group.

LEARNING TO WORK  Taking classes and learning new skills on a desktop or laptop computer—whether for work or fun—is common now because the process has become easier thanks to learning systems and courses developed using the IEEE 1484 series of standards. The three standards in the series define how online courses communicate with the systems that deliver them on a computer. Whether using courses developed by your employer, a university, or a commercial publisher, these systems can keep track of what you learned and help you find the content that matches your needs.

“Rather than thinking of learning as something you only do through separate courses, it’s being integrated into the software, such as word-processing programs, we use on a daily basis,” says Member Robby Robson, chair of the IEEE 1484 working group. “As we become more sophisticated about providing learning experiences, technical standards that operate behind the scenes become crucial for ensuring that we get the information we need to learn, when we need it, and in a format that makes sense.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION on these or other standards, visit the IEEE Standards Association at http://standards.ieee.org