This paper describes the origin of device-independent color, some of the events that led up to it and methods currently used to implement it. Any one of these topics would merit its own paper; describing them together will necessarily make this history short and selective.
Robert Buckley, "A Short History of Device-Independent Color" in Proc. IS&T 1st Color and Imaging Conf., 1993, pp 88 - 91, https://doi.org/10.2352/CIC.1993.1.1.art00021