Origins of ICC Color Management
The ICC has a brief history on their web site:
Before the ICC, the handling of color was very proprietary. If you bought equipment from one vendor, it couldn't be connected to equipment from other vendors. I find it remarkable these competitors were able to put aside their differences, and come up with a standard that has so greatly benefited the printing industry.
The history of color management actually began a decade earlier. In 1982, Richard E. Maurer of the Kodak Research Labs wrote a TAGA paper describing a system he and his team developed to analyze offset printing using colorimetry.
There is a photo on page 5 showing the hardware, which included a lab-style spectrophotometer mounted over an X-Y table. This device read the 144 patch target and fed the results into a computer program for analysis. So far as I know, this was the first use of an X-Y spectro to analyze print. The software produced a report that included suggested tone curves. For several years, Kodak offered this print analysis as a service to their customers.
I met Richard Maurer at the Kodak Research Labs. He was enthusiastic, helpful, and encouraged me to learn color science. He was a member of the "greatest generation" and an inspiration. Sadly, all of that is gone.