 Its origins reach back to World War II when a problem of providing exact color specifications to military equipment subcontractors in different parts of the world became a matter of urgency.Similarly to other color standards of the pre-digital era, such as RAL colour standard or British Standard 4800, Federal Standard 595 is a color collection rather than a color space.The standard is built upon a set of color shades where a unique reference number is assigned to each color.