Chapter 19: The Development of ASN.1

Chapter 20: Applications of ASN.1

This chapter is somewhat different in style from the rest of the book. (This summary is not a list a list of bullets, for a start!) While it does contain some facts, it is not so much a formal record of the stages and dates in the development of ASN.1 (Olivier Dubuisson's book is better for that see the link via Appendix 5) as my own personal recollections of the various events that occurred along the way.

Unusual for an academic text, in this chapter I blatantly use the "I" personal pronoun in several sections. It seemed appropriate.

I was involved in ASN.1 almost from its earliest days (I think that only Jim White I talk about Jim in the first part of this chapter can claim to have seen it through from its start, but he "retired" from Standards work in the late-1980s) through to the present day. I have been active in a number of areas of Standardization within ISO, but ASN.1 has probably taken up the largest part of my time because of its time-span (at the time of writing this text) of close to 20 years.

There were many other people who gave a great deal of their time to the development of ASN.1, and if you list some of them, you are in very great danger of being unfair to (and offending) those who just drop...