An important feature of ISO was its Central Programme. It covered a broad range of topics, ranging from planetary to stellar and interstellar investigations and the exploration of extragalactic sources and the Cosmos. Assurance that the data, gathered over a period of 28 months had been reliably obtained was provided by a deliberate policy to reserve one day in every seven for calibration and cross-calibration purposes. This made sure that data gathered at the beginning of the mission could be linked to data gathered at the end, and that information obtained with one instrument could be reliably backed up by observations obtained by one of the others. These precautions led to several major accomplishments recapitulated here. Spitzer built on some of ISO 's approaches and extended them further. The proposal tool Spot pioneered by Spitzer is facilitating Herschel proposal submission through its offspring HSpot. Spitzer's emphasis on Legacy Projects, large programs to create homogeneously gathered and archived data sets, has influenced the design of Herschel's Key Programmes. Spitzer's deliberate effort to establish collaborations with large ground based observatories and space-observatories covering complementing spectral ranges, led to further coordination in the pursuit of scientific goals. These efforts resulted in remarkable new findings.