The first proposal of a Flexible Image Transport
System for astronomy was made by Wells and Greisen (1979).
It described a general way to encode both a definition of the data
and the data itself in a machine independent way using magnetic
tape as the standard transport medium.
The advantage of using a standard format for transport of
astronomical images was soon realized and most major observatories
implemented it as the prime format for data exchange.
Subsequently, the FITS tape format (Wells et al.,
1981) was recommended as the standard format for
interchange of image data between all observatories by
Commission 5 at the 1982 General Assembly of IAU.
During the Patras meeting of IAU Commission 5, the possible extension of
the FITS format to table and catalog data was discussed.
As a result, a FITS Task Force under the Working Group on Astronomical Data
was made to define and test a table extension to the FITS standard.
The work of this Task Force resulted in a proposal for rules for generalized
extensions to FITS (Grosbøl et al., 1988) with a
special extension for table and catalog data (Harten et al., 1988).
The chapter in the printed book gives the general structure
of a FITS file
together with details of the different data formats provided.
Finally, the organization of FITS standard committees is outlined
describing how proposals for new extensions should be made to follow the
accepted standard.