3 ms·
The PDP successor, the VAX, was strangely little-endian.
by astrodust 9y ago
The PDP successor, the VAX, was strangely little-endian.
- watmough 9y agoCould Dave Cutler have foreseen ... nahhh!
- dasmoth 9y agoNot that strange — it was really the successor of the PDP-11, which was a quite different architecture.
- gumby 9y agoPDP-11 had a little endian architecture while big endian machines like the PDP-6/PDP-10 predominated on the net. To make life more interesting, the later PDP-10/20 mainframes used PDP-11 minicomputers as front end processors and often as network processors so byte-swapping was the norm. Luckily the PDP-10 allowed bytes ranging from 1-36 bits wide - “byte” had not yet standardized on 8 bits