By 1975, large organisations with a large user population were supporting possibly 20 different graphics systems. At the Atlas Computer Laboratory, there were 7 different systems for generating computer animation and more specialised systems for engineers, physicists and astronomers.

At the time, GINO-F, developed by the Cambridge CAD Centre in 1972, was popular with UK engineers and an attempt was made to make it a BSI and ISO graphics standard.

In the USA, SIGGRAPH's Graphics Standards Planning Committee (GSPC) in 1977 proposed a standard interface to computer graphics for applications programmers.

In August 1974, IFIP WG5.2 initiated an active programme directed towards establishing standards for computer graphics.

These various actions caused:

  • A Workshop on Methodology in Computer Graphics to be organised in May 1976
  • ISO set up a Working Group (ISO/TC97/SC5/WG2 - Graphics) to develop an International Standard for Computer Graphics. This first met in September 1978

Over the period 1978-1990, ISO defined several inter-working standards for computer graphics that were widely used both in the USA and Europe:

  • GKS (1985): the Graphics Kernel System
  • CGM (1987): Computer Graphics Metafile, for storage and exchange of two-dimensional graphical data
  • GKS-3D (1988): a 3-D Extension widely used by physicists and astronomers in the UK
  • PHIGS (1989): Programmer's Hierarchical Interactive Graphics Standard
  • CGRM (1992): Computer Graphics Reference Model
  • PHIGS PLUS (1994): an extension to PHIGS
  • GKS 2nd Edition (1994): a major amendment to GKS 85 that added NURB primitives and a nameset mechanism for binding of properties at either the logical or virtual levels of the CGRM

By 1994, VRML (originally the Virtual Reality Markup Language) was also gaining acceptance. This was the state of non-proprietary graphics systems by 1994 when the World Wide Web Consortium came into existence with the aim of standardising the graphics interface to the web.

None of these graphics standards provided any specific functionality for computer animation. However they were widely used and adopted over the period leading up to the invention of the web. CGM was used as a transport mechanism for video output of animated sequences. CGM continues to be used today as an interchange format for graphical information particularly in the aerospace and automotive industries.