The same was done "back in the day". On our systems, we had a reliable transport protocol (precursor to TCP/IP) that took advantage of the fact that the network

The same was done "back in the day". On our systems, we had a reliable transport protocol (precursor to TCP/IP) that took advantage of the fact that the network and hardware was all BE. Everyone tried to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the machines and avoiding the byte shuffling was not an insignificant performance gain. It's not surprising that people are now doing the same thing with x86-64 given its dominance.