ISO | ISO image | ISO 639-3 | ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 | ISO 216 | ISO/IEC 7816 | ISO 9660 | ISO 10303 | ISO/IEC 42010 | ISO/IEC 15693 | ISO Development Environment | ISO 639-2 | ISO 639-1 | ISO 3166-1 | ISO 26262 | ISO 20022 | List of ISO 639-3 codes | ISO/TS 16949 | ISO New England | Iso Lele | ISO/IEC 8859 | ISO/IEC 7810 | ISO/IEC 646 | ISO/IEC 24744 | Iso-Heikkilä Observatory | Iso H | ISO basic Latin alphabet | ISO 9529 | ISO 9362 | ISO 639 |
(Demand for accented vowels led to the 8-bit ISO 8859-1. Demand for Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and other letters led to many variations of ISO 8859. Demand for using more than one of these sets of letters at the same time led to the 16 bit Unicode. Demand for Chinese characters led to 20-bit Unicode, which clearly is impossible for any typewriter like formed character mechanical teleprinter, although dot-matrix printers can print Chinese characters.)
It is essentially an adaptation of the American system to the limitations of plain text encodings such as ISO-8859-1 and Windows-1252.