The standard that describes how digital data are to be recorded on compact disk media went through several different iterations before the format was finalized. The first step was the creation of the original data format standard, called the "yellow book", by Philips and Sony in 1983. This specification was based on the original "red book" format that was the basis for CD digital audio disks.
The "yellow book" specification was unfortunately general enough that it was feared that many different companies would implement proprietary data storage formats using this spec, resulting in many different incompatible data CDs. To try to prevent this, representatives of major manufacturers met at the High Sierra Hotel and Casino in Lake Tahoe, NV, in 1985, to come together on a common standard for data CDs. This format was nicknamed High Sierra Format. It was later modified slightly and adopted as ISO standard 9660.
Today, the terms "yellow book", High Sierra and ISO 9660 are used somewhat interchangeably to refer to standard data CDs, although the most common name is simply: "CD-ROM". This isn't technically precise, but the important thing is that virtually all data CDs that are in use today are standardized and will work in all standard CD-ROM drives, which was the main objective of all of this, of course. We call this format simply "data CD" for simplicity.