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Just a question for curiosity's sake; what do the letters ISO stand for?

I know that ISO files follow ISO-9660, the ISO in which stands for International Standards Organisation, but a lot of file formats will presumably follow some ISO standard, so that seems incorrect.

I couldn't find any answers to this on Wiki / Google

My best guess so far is: Image Standard Optical.

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  • According to Wikipedia, The name ISO is taken from the ISO 9660 file system used with CD-ROM media ...
    – Levans
    Dec 28, 2013 at 11:44

2 Answers 2

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I know that ISO files follow ISO-9660, the ISO in which stands for International Standards Organisation, but a lot of file formats will presumably follow some ISO standard, so that seems incorrect.

Yes, but then they have a different name for the file system (not ISO-9660).

Also, this little logical fact has never stopped someone from ignoring it. The file extension does come - as per Wikipedia - from that (the ISO-9660 file system).

SOmeone just had to pick something and made that choise.

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Did you really check wikipedia?

ISO 9660 (...) is a file system standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for optical disc media

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    I guess OP found it interesting that only .ISO files have ISO as its extension. Since .PDF files follow ISO standard but not named after the standard (but rather, "Portable Document Format"), OP questioned the origin of ISO in .ISO, which is however still given because of the ISO 9660 standard.
    – Frenzy Li
    Dec 28, 2013 at 12:00

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